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It wasn’t that Darcy couldn’t run her private catering business without JARVIS, because she had done it BTL (Before Tower Living) and could do it again if she had to. It was just that having JARVIS around made everything a million times easier.
“So if this recipe yields one dozen cupcakes, and I need to make a three-tiered cake using 12-inch diameter pans, how much do I need to multiply my ingredients by to have enough batter?”
Cue JARVIS with the math.
“I need to make rosewater syrup for the baklava. Where can I buy food-grade roses in New York?”
Cue JARVIS with a vendor.
“I am supposed to make a platypus out of fondant. Got a good reference photo you can beam up for me, J?”
Cue the perfect platypus reference.
It was amazing.
Less amazing was when JARVIS spilled the beans on her secret catering business to Pepper Potts.
Not that Darcy knew exactly why Pepper had forayed into Jane’s lab that fateful afternoon, because JARVIS hadn’t warned her. The only warning she had was the echoing clack of Pepper’s heels on the tile floor before she called out, “Darcy? Could I speak with you for a moment?”
Darcy pushed her glasses up her nose and blinked in surprise. It wasn’t that Pepper wasn’t friendly, but she had never come into Jane’s lab before. “Um, sure, Pepper. What’s up?”
Pepper jerked her chin towards the door and added, “In my office, please?”
At which point Darcy’s heart revved up to a million beats per minute and she could feel the nervous sweats starting because this was like getting called to the principal’s office. “Yeah, of course.” She grabbed her phone and started to follow Pepper out of the lab, only remembering to turn around at the last minute to warn Jane. “Janie! Pepper needs me but I’ll be back in a couple minutes, yeah?”
Jane continued to write equations on the whiteboard but waved her left hand in acknowledgement, so she knew that Darcy had spoken, at least, if not the exact content. Good enough.
And then the lab doors closed behind Darcy and she proceeded to take a mental inventory of everything she had done since moving to New York that might get her in trouble with Pepper Potts. Was it because she made Tony poptarts last week when he really should have gone to bed? Was it because Pepper found the color palette in her apartment distasteful? Was she misappropriating JARVIS by using him to recalculate ingredient ratios? Were her utilities consumptions too high because of all the cooking/baking/dishwashing and she was interfering with SI’s green initiative?
At this point they had reached Pepper’s office, and Darcy was waved into the seat across from Pepper’s desk as the redhead walked over to the credenza to pour herself a cup of coffee. “Darcy, would you like a cup?”
Darcy jerked around to look at her, surprised. Maybe she wasn’t in trouble if Pepper was offering her coffee? “Yes, please, that would be great.”
So once they were both settled with their respective mugs of caffeine, Pepper crossed her arms on the desk in front of her and said, “I’ve got a little problem that I’m hoping you can help me with.”
And Darcy’s mind screeched to a halt because how could she possibly help Pepper Potts, queen of the tech ‘verse, CEO, fashion icon… “Um, what?”
Pepper smiled warmly, and explained, “Natasha’s birthday is coming up and I need someone to cater the party. It will be fairly small, since she would kill me otherwise, but there are a ridiculous number of security protocols to get private contractors approved for any work in the residential parts of the Tower. JARVIS recommended that I speak to you, since you already have experience catering private events and there wouldn’t need to be any additional security checks.”
“JARVIS...told you...I--” Darcy broke off to take a deep breath and put her cup of coffee down on the desk before she dropped it. “Of course, Pepper, I’d be happy to do it.” She pulled up her calendar on her phone and asked, “When are we talking? Because I’ll be tied up with an anniversary party cake on the 18th and 19th and then a retirement party donut order on the 23rd and 24th.”
Pepper leaned forward, suddenly intent. “Did you just say that you can make donuts? From scratch?”
Darcy shrugged, inwardly preening at Pepper’s awed tone, “Given enough lead time and the proper equipment, I can make pretty much anything. I mean, candy gets a little hit or miss, but otherwise...”
So Pepper decided that she wanted to treat Natasha to a fancy Russian tea party. Pepper was going to buy a huge samovar to make tea in, and Darcy was going to make a bevy of Russian desserts.
And as long as it was Pepper planning and speaking in hypotheticals, it sounded wonderful, because somehow Pepper made everything sound so easy, so manageable, so sane. Pepper could talk about this like it was just two friends planning a surprise party for another friend, as though Darcy wasn’t supposed to be aware of the fact that Black Widow had been her favorite Avenger long before she met the woman behind the catsuit, or that Darcy had been harboring an embarrassingly juvenile crush on the Russian spy since she’d moved to the Tower with Jane.
Then Darcy fell down the rabbit hole of Russian desserts on the internet and started making lists of components and started to freak out about slightly more practical things. She needed to make several batches of multiple types of puff pastry (including yeasted pastry dough), to make homemade marshmallows, to make several different kinds of fruit preserves and jam, to find quark (which she had seen on an episode of Chopped once but never in real life), and buckets worth of honey and heavy cream. And a patterned baking tin for the gingerbread so it would at least kind of look like a real tula gingerbread even if wasn’t actually.
“JARVIS?!”
“Yes, Miss Darcy?”
“Help,” she groaned into her pile of notes.
She couldn’t mess up the Black Widow’s birthday party because you know, assassin-spy-hacker.
She couldn’t mess up Natasha’s birthday party because Natasha . Because Darcy wasn’t really sure that Natasha had ever had much of a birthday party in her life, and what birthday cakes there had been, Darcy suspected, were of the grocery-store variety that people always brought into the office for birthdays, or maybe, at best, Clint had made an attempt at boxed-mix cake with canned frosting. (It would have been a miracle if the cake hadn't been burnt.)
So, if there was one catering job she absolutely could not mess up, it was going to be the one for Pepper Potts and Natasha Romanoff and the rest of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. Even if they had no idea it was her who made the food.
Except that was actually even worse because they were going to be eating it in front of her without any idea that she had baked all of it and what if it wasn’t good? What if her pastry didn’t puff? What if her pastry burnt ? What if the cell structure of her bread wasn’t right because she didn’t let it proof long enough? What if she had runny pastry cream?
Darcy rolled up the sleeves of the plaid button-down she had borrowed from Jane several months earlier and stomped into the kitchen. “Practice makes perfect, Lewis. Get your head in the game.”
“JARVIS?”
“Yes, Miss.”
“Give me a baking playlist. Something I can sing along to.”
“Immediately, Miss.”
“Why did I pick the bread recipe with 17 ingredients when there was one that only had 7?”
“You said you found it intriguing, Miss.”
Darcy sighed and went back to sifting out the three different types of flour she needed.
“JARVIS?”
“Yes, Miss?”
“Where in this God-forsaken wasteland can I buy quark?”
“Would it not be easier to use cottage cheese, as the recipe suggests for an alternative?”
“JARVIS, I am not a beleaguered suburban mother of three making one of Ina Garten’s shockingly easy recipes for which the refrains ‘store-bought is fine’ or ‘whatever you have on hand’ is considered acceptable. Do you want to explain to the Black Widow that we messed up her vatrushka because quark required cab fare to acquire?”
There was brief pause, in which Darcy liked to imagine JARVIS processing the sensation of horror, before his sedate tone came back over the speakers.“Of course not. I shall get right on that.”
Darcy steered Jane to sit on one of the bar stools in the kitchen and pointed to two seemingly identical plates of trubochki . “One of those is made with half-puff and the other with full-puff pastry. Tell me if you can tell the difference.”
Jane shoved one in her mouth and moaned. “That is so good,” she mumbled around a mouthful of puff pastry and cream. “What are these called again?”
“Torpedos. But in Russian.”
Jane nodded and grabbed a second one, this time from the half-puff batch. “Appropriate. And delicious .”
By the time the day of Natasha’s party finally rolled around, Darcy had already practiced making every component of the spread at least three times, and taste-tested every single batch. So as happy as she was to see everyone else sampling the apple sharlotka cake and popping cherry and quark filled vatrushka into their mouths, and shedding flakes of puff pastry as they bit into Napoleons, and topping their 17 Ingredient Russian Black Bread with caviar and smoked salmon, she could not eat any of it. She drank tea and chatted with Thor and Jane and kept an eye on Natasha as she sampled the goods but the mere thought of consuming another honey-dipped or poppy-seed adorned piece of dough made her want to jump out the window and also scream uncontrollably and maybe even taze herself. She pretended she needed to go to the bathroom and ducked out into the hallway so that she could communicate with JARVIS unobserved.
“J, my man, help a girl out.”
“Anything, Miss. I must say, the party seems to be going well.”
“Yeah, but I am starving and I cannot eat another pastry after the last two weeks. Can you get a pizza delivered to my place? Extra olives.”
“Of course, Miss. I shall send you a text when it has been delivered to your quarters.”
Darcy started to walk backwards in the direction of the living room. “You’re the man, J. The peanut butter to my jelly. The caviar to my blini. The plaid flannel to my leggings. The-- oomph !” She cartwheeled her arms to regain her balance after bumping into something behind her, eventually turning around and coming face-to-face with the birthday assassin herself.
“Heyyy, Natasha! Happy Birthday! I haven’t had a chance to wish you a happy birthday yet, which seems a terrible oversight given the whole…” (DO NOT SAY ‘PAST SEVERAL WEEKS OF RUSSIAN BAKING I HAVE DONE FOR YOU’) “the whole party going on, over there, in your honor.”
Natasha frowned. Which was not good, Darcy did not want Natasha to frown at her, especially on her birthday, the day that needed to go off without a hitch, why was she frowning...
“Why aren’t you eating anything?”
Darcy blinked at her. “I hate sweets?”
“Do not lie to me. You bake all the time. I can smell it from my apartment.”
“I’m...allergic to poppy seeds?”
“You eat everything bagels on a regular basis. They’re your favorite.”
“I’m experimenting with veganism?”
Natasha rolled her eyes. “You put milk in your tea not ten minutes ago.”
“I...just had a dentist’s appointment and can’t eat for another 30 minutes because of the fluoride treatment?”
Natasha didn’t even bother to respond to that one, just arched a single disbelieving eyebrow.
Darcy, suddenly feeling an uncomfortable kinship with the mice people fed to their giant pet snakes, froze in front of her.
“Darcy, why aren’t you eating?” Natasha’s tone had softened, and she sounded almost concerned.
“Oh my god.” It had suddenly dawned on Darcy why Natasha sounded so concerned. “This isn’t some kind of eating disorder thing. I eat. I eat a lot. And often. Really unhealthy things, even. And I don’t throw them up afterwards. In fact, I am going to go home after this and eat a pizza and feel really good about myself.”
If anything, Natasha looked even more skeptical because she probably thought this was one of those “methinks the lady doth protest too much” scenarios, which it was not, but Darcy was running out of evasion tactics.
“Darcy!” Jane came sweeping around the corner, her face lighting up at the sight of Darcy, “Did you hold back any of the sour cherry preserves, because that stuff is amazing and I want to put it in my oatmeal forever.”
Before Darcy could censor herself, she felt the words, “No, I didn’t pit enough cherries to make extra, but there’s some strawberry varenye left if you want that instead, plus a few loaves of black bread in the freezer for sandwiches,” fall out of her mouth like stones because feeding Jane was her thing and whenever her little scientist showed an interest in anything other than pop tarts or boxed mac and cheese Darcy had trained herself to jump on it and make several varieties of it.
“Thanks, Darce!” Jane called as she bounded back to the party.
Natasha had focused intent green eyes on her by the time Darcy turned back around. “You made everything?”
“Except the tea. Pepper did the tea stuff, I did the food stuff.”
Natasha nodded, realization dawning. “So you’re not eating because…”
“I’ve been sampling test batches of everything for weeks now trying to make sure it was perfect and I really cannot stomach another pastry. I wasn’t kidding when I said I’m getting pizza. I only came out here to ask JARVIS to get one delivered because I’m so hungry.”
And with that Natasha smiled, warm and incandescent, and Darcy felt the bottom drop out of her stomach for an entirely new reason. “You did all that for me? No one’s ever made me a birthday cake before.”
Darcy smiled back, flushed and pleased and a little nervous. “Being the overachiever that I am, I couldn’t stop at just one.”
Natasha laughed and linked arms with Darcy, pulling her back towards the party. “Hey, JARVIS? Have that pizza delivered to the common room.”
Darcy glanced at her out of the corner of her eye, trying not to fixate on the warm point of contact at her elbow and failing. “You know the boys will try to steal my pizza if it comes to the common room.”
Natasha smirked and pulled Darcy incrementally closer. “They can certainly try.”
One week later Natasha showed up to the team briefing with a ziplock bag of homemade granola that she slowly crunched on over the course of the meeting. She smacked Clint’s hand away when he tried to steal a piece and glared at Tony before he could even try.
The following week she walked into the room eating a snickerdoodle cookie.
She came to their next Assemble call fully-uniformed and eating a chocolate cupcake with mocha toffee buttercream that Tony eyed enviously from his seat on the jet.
Steve gestured towards his face and hesitantly said, “Um, Nat, you’ve got a little something right there…”
She swiped the dollop of frosting off her nose and stuck it into her mouth with a shrug.
The following week she brought an entire batch of Darcy’s cupcakes to the briefing, a mix of carrot cake with orange cream cheese frosting and what Darcy called Pink Lady Cupcakes, but were actually just strawberry cupcakes with a lemon buttercream. Natasha set the plate precisely in the center of the table, without jostling a single perfectly-crafted swirl of frosting, snatched one of the carrot cake cupcakes and took her seat without a word.
Tony’s eyes darted between the plate of cupcakes and Natasha suspiciously. “Romanoff, where did you get a plate of cupcakes that appear to spell out--” He tilted his head to get a better view. “--Happy 8th Birthday, Mariana?”
“From my girlfriend,” Natasha stated, utterly nonchalant, before taking a giant bite of the cupcake.
“Awwww yeah!” Clint held out a hand for a high-five, waving it until Natasha finally complied while fighting a small self-satisfied smile.
A round of heartfelt congratulations followed from the rest of the team, before Steve’s eyes narrowed and he finally asked, “But why did she give you an eight year old’s birthday cupcakes to give to us?”