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The steps to making a cake are simple. Make the cake batter, bake it, then add the frosting and toppings and then eat it. Easy, Right?
Wrong.
Till is completely and utterly wrong. Baking a cake would be easy if he’d been doing it by himself— or with anybody but Ivan —but that’s not what happened. Ivan had thrown out the idea, randomly suggesting this wonderful November day to bake a cake out of the blue. Till has no idea where this plan came from, he’s never baked once in his life. The most he’s ever cooked is buying the convenience store pre-made meals, opening up the packaging and shutting it in the microwave to heat for a few minutes. Baking? Not a chance.
Ivan is the one who had suggested it, he’d practically gotten on his knees and begged Till to bake a cake with him— forgetting the fact that neither he or Till had any baking experience. Ivan usually did all the cooking but baking? Never. Till would’ve never gone with this idea in the first place, except Ivan kept bothering him about it, every single hour of the day. As soon as he said yes, Ivan rushed to the store and got all their ingredients and told him to get ready for baking the next day. That’s how Till ended up in this situation.
Till rests his elbows on the counter, head resting in his hands. He takes a glance at Ivan who is still looking through all the different recipes in the recipe book he had bought yesterday. He’s growing bored out of his mind waiting for Ivan to just pick one.
“Ivan, just pick one.” Till complains, cutting through the silence.
Ivan looks up from the book, midway through flipping a page, “I need the right cake recipe, you need to like this one!”
Till sighs, pushing himself off the counter to where Ivan has the book set. “I’ll take a look.” Ivan lets him take the book, and Till immediately flips through the book, trying to find an easy recipe to make.
“What flavor cake mix did you get?”
“Vanilla.”
He gives Ivan a look. “If you get vanilla cake mix, you make a vanilla cake.”
With this, Ivan smiles at him sheepishly. Till rolls his eyes, wondering how on earth he got such an idiotic boyfriend. He quickly flips through the pages of the book, trying to spot an easy recipe they can do for vanilla cake. Ivan’s eyes are on him while he does this and Till pauses to glance at him.
“Get the cake mix.” He scolds, “The baking powder and sugar, anything we would need in any basic cake recipe while I find one.” Ivan nods, finally taking his eyes off Till. As soon as he goes to the pantry to fetch the ingredients, Till finally finds a page with an easy vanilla cake recipe they can follow.
Now, to hope that he and Ivan weren’t going to make a disaster of this cake.
Ivan brings him the granulated sugar, baking powder and the cake mix. Till takes a glance once again at the recipe, then frowns.
“You better hope you have all these ingredients or otherwise we can’t make the cake.” Ivan pops up behind him suddenly, leaning over Till to read the ingredients. He doesn’t say anything for a minute and Till lightly moves aside to let him get a better angle of the book.
When he’s done reading, he huffs, “I have all this, these are ingredients you use in everyday cooking.”
Till gives him a look. “You have lemon zest?”
Ivan nods.
“And vanilla extract?”
Another nod.
“You have enough eggs and you have tartar?” Ivan gives him a disappointed look.
“I told you I have enough.” Ivan then moves his hand over to pat Till’s head but he quickly ducks out of the way, giving him a scowl in protest. His boyfriend then goes back to the pantry, fetching all the ingredients. Till reads through the recipe list again, he’ll need a teaspoon, a tablespoon, and probably a cup and half cup to prep all the food.
The next thing Till has to figure out is where Ivan stores all his measuring tools. The lack of cooking is definitely making things way harder than they should be. He looks around the kitchen, beginning with the first drawer to see if he could find the measuring tools.
Not here. Nor there. He pulls open another drawer. Not in there, and not in that drawer.
“Just set the oven to 350 fahrenheit and I’ll get the measuring cups!” Ivan calls from the pantry, almost invisible behind all the ingredients stacked in his hands. Till looks at the number of things Ivan is carrying, he’s not hoping to bring it all in one trip, right?
Till goes over to the oven, turning the knob over to 350 degrees, watching it turn on and slowly wind up to the amount. He knows that much, but what’s next? He looks over at the recipe. He needs to grease an eight inch pan…and how would he do that? The next step is to get the ingredients into a medium bowl and then whisk it all together.
He knows how to do that. “Ivan, do you know how to grease a cake pan?” He calls out.
“I think you’d grease it like a car or something!” Ivan replies. Till gives the book another glance.
That’s not what that means right?
“Are you sure?” He asks, feeling doubtful. It didn’t mean adding oil or anything like that, but he’s not sure. Ivan does have vegetable oil if he recalls correctly, but using vegetable oil to grease wouldn’t seem right. He’ll just check the internet, that seems like the best solution.
After one internet search later, Till comes to the conclusion that greasing a pan is indeed not with vegetable oil. He just needs butter. Ivan pops up right behind him after he opens the fridge.
“What do you need from there?” Till jerks his head behind him.
“What the hell?! Stop doing that.” He huffs.
Ivan gives him that smile he always does and Till ignores him in favor of grabbing the butter. Now to actually grease the cake pan. Ivan already has everything set up, including the ingredients and he’s done Till the favor of not having to search for the whisk and measuring cups. The only problem with that is that he still has no idea where they’re actually stored.
He’s watched the video for how to grease a cake pan, so Till is confident that he can do this. “Can you add the dry ingredients to the bowl?”
“Will do!” Ivan immediately goes over to the bowl, pouring the ingredients into their respective measuring cups and then into the bowl. Till stares at him for a second, surprised at how he’s taking this activity seriously when actually baking. He quickly yanks himself out of his thoughts and closes the fridge door. He needs to stop staring at his boyfriend and actually get started greasing the pan.
Till grabs a knife from the rest of the utensils, cutting off a section of the butter for greasing. Ivan has already managed to think of everything and got out the brush for smoothing out the butter. Till pauses, glancing at him.
“I thought you didn’t know how to grease a pan?” He asks, motioning towards the brush.
Ivan pauses in his measuring, glancing at him, “I do! You just brush it all over with whatever you use for your grease just like you would do with a car.”
Till looks at him. He’s pretty sure that’s not how you would grease a car. He’d already searched it up out of curiosity and it’s definitely not, but who was he to say anything if he at least knew how to grease a pan? He goes back to his task, dropping a slice of butter into the pan and proceeding to brush it along the surface of the pan until it melted. In the meantime, Ivan had already moved to the next step, adding the three eggs into the bowl.
“Pass the butter will you?” Till slides over the opened pack of butter over to Ivan, letting him take control of it.
Being done with the first couple of steps, he wants to see what steps are next. The only thing left is a whole lot of waiting, over an hour and a half. They’d have to bake the cake for about twenty or so minutes then they’d have to wait about an hour for it to cool. Did they have gelatin though?
He glances at Ivan who’s put the butter into a one-fourth cup. “Are you going to melt that now?”
“Yeah! Then it’s just waiting till the cake is done baking!” Till nods and Ivan puts the cup in the microwave. Ivan puts a quick cover on top of the butter and then sets the heating time for thirty seconds. Going back to the recipe, Till reads the rest of the steps. They’ll have to prepare a gelatin to mix with vanilla extract and then they’d have to create the cream. Most of it was preparing the mousse and then spreading jam in the cake rather than making the actual cake.
The microwave beeps, signalling that the wait is over.
Ivan pulls the cup of butter out of the microwave, pouring the cup into the rest of the ingredients. He proceeds to take out a spatula and slowly mix the batter thoroughly. Till watches carefully as his boyfriend prepares the batter, stirring the crumbly mix into a much smoother blend.
The crumbling texture becomes smooth and yellow, swirling along with his spatula. Occasionally Ivan scrapes his spatula along the sides, getting the texture that hadn’t gone into the blend on the first try. Once he’s done he holds out the bowl.
“Do you want to pour it in the pan?” He asks.
Till takes the bowl from his hands, almost dropping it by the sudden change in weight. He holds the bowl, feeling his body tense as he slowly tilts it in the direction of the pan.
The batter slowly sinks out of the bowl, dripping down and onto the pan. Till watches the batter sludge out, crawling as it does so. When he’s done pouring it into the pan, Ivvan hands him a spatula. Till holds the bowl in one hand, taking the spatula with slight confusion.
He looks in the bowl then realizes there’s some batter still stuck to the edges. He scrapes out the sides of the bowl, attempting to get out most of the batter. There’s definitely some that spilled out when he attempted to pour it, considering the fact that there’s a slight puddle of batter on the edge of the pan.
“I’ll put it in the oven, you can relax and I’ll join you in a bit!” Ivan says, grabbing a bit of paper towel, or whatever it’s called to wipe up the mess. Till glances at him, but Ivan just smiles.
– – –
Ivan and Till are staring at the spilled packet which now stained their kitchen counter. They’d already let the cake go through the process of baking and cooling and now they were dealing with the gelatin packets. Till had prepared the water and Ivan was supposed to cut open the gelatin packet but he’d opened it and the powder had spilled all over the counter.
He glances at Ivan for a moment. You just sweep powder up with your hands right? Till brushes the gelatin powder into one hand, letting it slide off the counter onto his palm. He carries the scoop of powder to the trash can and dumps it there. He quickly sweeps his hands clean, turning back to Ivan who has more intelligently put the gelatin packet over the water this time.
“So, how do you whip heavy cream?” Till asks. Ivan glances at him.
“Not sure, let’s watch a video!” He says with a smile.
They pull up a video on Ivan’s phone, watching it thoroughly to mimic the process. Till takes the initiative with the first attempt, trying to recreate the whip they’d seen. That attempt ends up in a disaster.
It looks nothing like the video.
Ivan tries this time.
Equally as bad. Till eyes him. “How did you get the cream on your nose?”
“I have no idea, maybe it was magic!” Ivan exclaims, whipping around the whisk like a sword. That explains it.
Changing the subject, Till glances at the gelatin. “It’ll be fine to let it sit a while longer while we make the cream, right?”
“Sure!” Ivan says, “There’s enough powdered sugar to try again a couple more times.” He’s about to scoop up two cups of heavy cream when Till stops him.
“Let’s watch the video again.” Ivan nods, listening to Till. They play the video following the first steps, and then Till pauses it. He motions for Ivan to copy the steps. Ivan grabs out the two cups of heavy cream, following the instructions of the video as Till makes him watch it and replicate it step by step. The end result is better than the others.
Their attention then goes back to the unattended gelatin mixture. “It’ll be fine right?” Till questions, considering that they were only supposed to leave it for five minutes alone and it had been about twenty just trying to figure out how to produce those results. This included cleaning up the failed mousse every time they made it.
“Should be fine!” Ivan responds. They read the steps again in the recipe book, heating it and then adding the vanilla extract.
The next step says for them to “gently fold the dissolved gelatin mixture” so they do that. To the best of their abilities. Till is pretty sure that the mousse isn’t supposed to look like that, but he’s not going to make everything with Ivan again. Just getting the batter made takes forever and Ivan doesn’t have an electric mixer to make the steps easier.
“Do you have raspberry jam? The recipe suggests it.” Ivan shakes his head.
“I have mango jam instead, does that work?” Till glances at the recipe. It didn’t really matter if they used raspberry jam or mango jam…so using the mango jam should be fine.
He nods. “Bring it here, I’ll grab the cake.” Till grabs the two halves of the cake, putting them down on aluminium foil he and Ivan had set up earlier. Ivan passes him the jam and Till scoops it up with a spoon, lightly dropping it on the surface of the cake. He fetches a knife, using it to spread the jam across the surface of the cake.
He lightly brushes it against the cake’s surface, evenly spreading the mango jam on top. Once he’s done, he steps back, taking a look at his handiwork. Ivan takes a glance at the cake.
“Once we add the mousse, we have to wait four hours before it’s cooled, right?” Till nods.
Ivan gives him a sad look, “I can’t wait that long!”
“Yes you can, and you will.” Till retorts, picking up the jam covered piece of cake and putting it into another pan that they’d planned on using to store the cake. With the other half, he grabs a spatula to spread the mousse on top. He does the same as he’d done with the jam half. Till uses the spatula to spread the mousse across the cake, covering it with a high amount that it was noticeable in contrast to the amount of cake.
When he’s done with it, he’s about to put the spatula in the sink when Ivan snatches it from him. The look on Till’s face can be easily described as open mouthed disgust. He stares helplessly as Ivan licks the spatula clean, trying to drag himself away from him.
He transfers the half of cake onto the jam piece, making sure it’s properly fitted in the pan.
Till sets it in the fridge, giving Ivan a glance. How on earth he managed to lick that much mousse off a spatula was beyond him. Ivan had practically cleaned the spoon for them, except now it’s covered in his saliva.
“We need to wait four hours before we can eat it.” Ivan finally stops licking the spoon, smiling at him.
“Sounds good!”
When the time had finally passed, a timer was already ringing loudly in Till’s ears. He jerks up, looking around confusedly. Who set an alarm for this time? He hadn’t even had time to process the sound in his ears when he spotted Ivan by the fridge, already opening it, ready to pounce on the cake.
“Ivan! Wait, I’ll do the cutting.” Till exclaims, he doesn’t trust Ivan to do the cutting. Ivan always cuts him a super big slice and then there isn’t enough cake to go around.
He rushes over to the fridge, coming to join Ivan as he sets down the cake. Till quickly grabs a knife, taking the advantage to begin cutting. Ivan comes up with the plates, setting them down on the counter. Till cuts the slices, setting one on his plate and one on Ivan’s. He then puts away the cake, tossing the knife into the sink.
Ivan passes him a fork and he watches as Ivan takes a bite of the cake.
“Is it good?” Till asks curiously.
“Yep! Delicious!” Ivan says, swallowing down his bite of cake.
Till takes a bite. Ivan must have really bad taste, because this doesn’t taste good at all! If there’s anything he’s learned from this, he’s never baking with Ivan again unless they both magically get good at baking.