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“Okay,” Mikey said with a crisp clap and an excited bounce. “Here are the rules for the Hamato Clan’s Christmas Cookie Clash! One: All cookies must be handmade, and made within the time limit. Two: No bribing the judge." He shot a glare toward Leo, who tucked a wad of cash behind his back with a completely innocent expression that practically screamed ‘I have done nothing wrong in my life. EVER.’
“Three,” Mikey continued, switching his accusatory glare toward Raph. “Do not eat the other competitor's cookies.”
Raph at least had the decency to look ashamed of himself, muttering something under his breath that sounded suspiciously like: ‘They were really good, okay?’
“And finally–” Mikey turned his gaze toward the final of his brothers “–Uranium is not allowed, under any circumstances. Everyone clear?”
Leo, Raph, and Donnie nodded.
“I’m totally going to win this year,” Leo said, sticking his nose in the air and sauntering past Donnie. “I’ve got some tricks up my sleeve.” “You don’t have sleeves, Nardo,” Donnie deadpanned. “Besides, historically, your cookies have always been undercooked because you lack the patience to let them fully cook.” He held up a fist, which Shelldon, Donnie’s designated sous-chef, bumped obligingly.
“Oh sure.” Leo swung his arm over Donnie’s shoulders, leaning dramatically against him with a smirk. “If your scientifically-based cookies are so good, then why have you never beaten Mikey?”
Mechanical arms slid out from Donnie’s battle shell, pulling Leo off him and depositing him on the floor. “Bold words from the one who’s lost just as many times as I—Donatello the genius–”
“More like Donatello the bakingly–challenged,” Leo interrupted with a sly grin. “All right, boys,” Raph said, stepping in between the twins in preparation for the fight that was sure to happen, if he didn’t intervene. “Let’s let the cookies speak for themselves, okay?”
“Fine,” Donnie said with a huff and a scathing glare in Leo’s direction.
Leo saluted. “Hear ya loud and clear, big guy.”
“April?” Mikey called to their sister, who was setting up her camera in the corner. “You all set?”
“Yep!” she replied, flashing him a thumbs up. “Ready and waiting to capture the chaos!”
Mikey turned to Splinter. “And our judge?”
Splinter had convinced Raph to bring his chair from the TV room to the kitchen, and was currently snoring, with a mug of Mikey’s hot cocoa in hand and Donnie’s portable TV quietly babbling on his stomach.
Mikey shrugged. “We’ll wake him up later.”
“All right!” April shouted. “Boys! Get to your stations! Camera and timer begins in five… four… three…”
The four competitors scrambled to their stations, aka whatever spots around the kitchen could function as a flat surface.
April’s finger hovered over her phone, and the three hour timer set there. “Two… ONE! BAKE!”
HOUR ONE:
“Get your own recipe!” Raph shouted, smacking Leo’s hand away from where it was inching toward his recipe.
“Wha– Pshh– Huhhh– I would never,” Leo spluttered, scrambling to lean nonchalantly against the flour-covered counter, the very picture of cool and collected. “I was just coming over to see how it’s going. Because I’m a good brother. Obviously.”
Raph, unimpressed, slid his recipe away from Leo’s suspiciously close hand. “Sure, sure, Leo. You’re just mad cuz you’ve never won.”
Leo flopped his hand in the air, leaning even further over the counter. “Ooooohhhh, Raph, but what you don’t know is that I’ve got a special ingredient up my sleeve. I’ve got the win in the bag this year, just you—”
His feet slipped on the flour-covered floor, and Leo went crashing to the floor, limbs flailing all the way down, squawking in surprise.
“Tell me you got that, April!” Donnie shouted gleefully from across the room.
“Oh, you know it!” April shouted back.
Leo scrambled to his feet, completely covered in flour. “Go ahead,” he said, scowling and haughtily stalking back to his station, the effect of which was ruined by the cloud of flour that floated in the air as he passed by. “Laugh. I’ll win. Just you wait!”
“Don’t worry, Lee,” Mikey called innocently, mixing his bowl of batter. “We will. For eons, if necessary.”
Leo gasped theatrically, slapping a flour-covered hand to his flour-covered plastron. “You’re supposed to be on my side, Mike! How could you?”
Mikey flashed him a toothy smile that was not friendly in the slightest. “You were trying to cheat, Lee. Now get back to your station.”
“Fine, fine, I get it. Yeesh.” Leo rolled his eyes, sticking his tongue out at Mikey and grumbling all the way back to his station.
“Meanwhile,” April narrated, “at the other station, Donnie and his sidekick Shelldon were busy with…” she trailed off. “Uh… What are you doing over there, Dee?”
“Excuse you,” Shelldon said with a sniff. “We are co-chefs. Right, Donnie?”
Donnie, hunched over his station with the equivalent posture of a gremlin with back problems that would make any chiropractor shudder in horror, grunted in reply. His goggles were fixed firmly over his eyes, and his eyebrows were furrowed in concentration.
“Tello?” April repeated. “Watcha doin’?” “SCIENCE!” Donnie shouted, straightening up and holding his creation aloft triumphantly. “BEHOLD, A FULLY FUNCTIONAL ALL IN ONE COOKIE MAKER.” He was holding what appeared to be a sleek silver box with the letters C.O.O.K.I.E etched into the side.
“It stands for Crunchy Oven-baked Originally Kreated Incredible Edibles,” Shelldon said proudly. “I came up with the acronym.”
Donnie scrambled onto a kitchen stool for greater dramaticism. “It slices! It dices! It mixes! It cooks! It decorates! It’s the new wave of cookie baking technology, and it shall allow me to win this year’s competition with time to sit back, relax, and watch you cry tears of Christmasy defeat!”
“There’s no uranium in it, right?” Raph asked from across the room, his hands covered in batter, with some mysteriously stuck around his mouth for no discernible reason.
Donnie paused, face contorting into a supremely bad lying face. “Noooooo… There is…n’t. Obviously there isn’t! I read the rule book.”
“There is no rule book,” Leo said. “The rules are written on an index card in Mikey’s recipe box.”
“Well,” Donnie said, nodding to himself. “I read that.”
“Donnie,” Raph said warningly, and Donnie stuck his lip out in a pout.
“Fine!” Donnie threw his hands up in the air. “There’s a smidgen of Uranium! But only a marginal amount, it’s only used for a power source, and I didn’t even put any in the batter this time!”
“You know the rules,” Mikey said, shaking his head in disappointment. “Donnie, you can’t use the C.O.O.K.I.E.”
Donnie, grumbling all the way, handed the machine over to April. “You’re stunting the growth of cookie baking technology,” he said, most definitely not moping. “I HOPE YOU KNOW.”
“Sure,” April said without an ounce of sympathy in her voice. “Now you better get baking, cause you’re really behind.”
Donnie huffed. “Fine. Shelldon, get out the outdated equipment.”
Leo chuckled at his twin’s misfortune, and if you had asked any of the others, they would have said that the faceful of butter that Leo received from Donnie’s Blunderbus was completely deserved.
HOUR TWO:
“And how are you doing, Raph-a-doodle?” April asked Raph, shoving her hand-held camera close to his face.
“Fine,” Raph said, forehead wrinkled in concern. “Only, I think I messed up.” He held up his baking sheet, showing April and the camera the cookies that had spread to merge into one gigantic cookie.
April snorted. “Cookie-nental drift. Get it? Like continental drift?”
Raph shook his head. “It’s a tragedy, Apes.” He stood there for a moment, grieving the loss of the cookies. Then, he shrugged. “Oh well. Can’t use these, might as well try them out.”
He picked up the one large cookie, holding it above his mouth.
“Hang on!” April squawked, reaching for the cookie. “You’re not gonna give me any?”
Begrudgingly, Raph broke off a piece for April and dropped the rest into his mouth. “Hmmm.” He nodded, chewing slowly and grinning. “That’s good.”
“Raaaaph!” Leo called from the other side of the room. “Why didn’t you give me any?”
“Because you’re a cheating cheater.”
“Am not!”
“Are too!” Mikey chimed in. “Ahhh, Mikey!” April patted Raph on the arm and picked her way over the dirty floor toward Mikey. “You need a bit of the spotlight. What type of cookies are you making this year?”
“Well, April,” Mikey said, giving her a beaming flour-covered grin. “I’m glad you asked! Over here we have my orange-zest ginger snaps, dusted with powdered sugar. Over here we have classic sugar cookies, they’re cooling before I frost them. Then, over there are the gingerbread house parts I’ll assemble later, and—”
“Awesome,” April interrupted, panning the camera across the counter to show all of the cookies. “Can I try one?”
“Sure,” Mikey said, beaming, and handed her a ginger snap. April switched the camera’s view around to video her reaction as she bit into the cookie, smiling in anticipation. Mikey’s grin grew. “Whaddya think?” he asked as April chewed.
“It’s—” April’s eyes widened, and she froze. Her face flipped through a series of impressively complicated expressions, settling on a pained grimace. “Uh, Mikey, that’s…”
Mikey’s face fell. “Are they bad? Are they awful? Are they the worst thing you’ve ever had?”
“Nahhhh,” April said, slowly reaching for a glass of water. “I think… Hm.” She downed the glass of water, then set the camera down, picking up Mikey’s bucket of sugar. Slowly, she reached inside and picked up a pinch of sugar.
The room was silent and tense, each of the brothers pausing their activities to watch. April brought the sugar to her mouth, licking the sugar off her tongue. For another moment, all was quiet. Then–
“AHA!”
Mikey jumped like a startled cat at April’s sudden outburst. “Well?” he asked, anxious.
“I KNEW IT,” April shouted. “Someone SABOTAGED you! This is SALT!”
Simultaneously, Donnie, Raph, Mikey, and April turned to stare at Leo.
“What?” Leo asked. “Why do you assume I did anything? I didn’t do anything! I wouldn’t switch Mikey’s ingredients like that, I’m not evil.”
“We all know how badly you want to win,” Donnie said, and behind him, Shelldon held up a sign that he had pulled from who-knows-where that read ‘LEO’S GUILTY—PUNISH HIM’.
“No punishments!” Leo protested, holding his hands up. “I didn’t do anything!”
“I say he should be disqualified,” Donnie said, crossing his arms and shaking his head. “How could you, Nardo? Ruining poor Mikey’s chances of success. Tsk. How could you?”
“Well, excuuuuuse me, Donatello,” Leo snapped. “You’re awfully accusative. I bet you sabotaged Mikey’s cookies!”
Donnie reeled back, mouth dropping open. Behind him, Shelldon held up a new sign that read ‘DONNIE’S A SAINT—HE WOULD NEVER’.
“You tried to frame me!” Leo shouted, leaping forward over his table. He snagged a bowl of batter and launched himself toward Donnie. Eyes wide, Donnie stumbled backward, mechanical arms reaching out from his shell to stop Leo, but it was too late. The batter went flying, hitting Donnie square in the face with a wet thwack.
Donnie’s mechanical arms tossed a carton of milk at Leo, and it was on. The twins tumbled to the floor in a tussle of flying arms and legs, ingredients spurting into the air. Shelldon held up a third sign that read ‘GO DONNIE GO!!!’
Raph, ever the responsible one, attempted to separate the twins, only for a well timed kick to send flour straight into his eyes.
“BOYS!”
The cloud of flour settled, revealing two dirty and disheveled turtles with matching guilty expressions.
“Yes, dad?” They said together.
Splinter heaved himself off his chair. “Here I was,” he said, eyeing the scene disdainfully. “Expecting to wake up to delicious cookies, and instead I wake up to you two–” he pointed at the twins with a long, accusatory finger. “Fighting and wasting perfectly good ingredients."
Donnie and Leo hung their heads.
“Now,” Splinter said, putting his hands on his hips. “You two will get up, finish the competition, and maybe, if your cookies are good enough, I shall forgive you. And,” he said, pinning them with his practiced glare. “You will clean the kitchen top to bottom, until not a speck of flour is to be found.”
April, ever the opportunist, had taken the chance to video the whole thing, getting the good angles on the twins’ fight. And apparently, Splinter’s movie star side was not forgotten, because he turned toward the camera, struck a pose that made each of his children die a bit inside, and said, in a perfectly suave voice, “Yes, Lou Jitsu’s still got it.”
Then, he turned, plopped back in his chair, and glued his eyes onto the screen.
HOUR THREE:
Mikey had decided to drop charges, shaking his head and saying that he had probably mistakenly switched the ingredients, while eyeing the twins with thinly veiled suspicion. And so, in the final hour, he began on an entirely new batch of cookies, putting him behind the others.
Well. It would have, had Raph not eaten his second and third batches of cookies, saying that they were first too overcooked, and then that they hadn’t risen enough, so they clearly couldn’t be presented as his finished product. Donnie, on his part, had gotten into a fight with Shelldon over who was lead chef, leading them to argue for a good twenty minutes, while Raph sneakily stole cookies from Donnie’s cooling rack. Shelldon eventually stormed off, and Leo, of course, needed to use the bathroom at that exact moment.
If Donnie’s oven was accidentally turned up to five thousand degrees, charring the cookies in an instant, Leo wasn’t to blame, clearly, since he was in the room, with witnesses, the whole time, and Shelldon had left, and had most definitely not hacked into anything.
So, in all, Mikey wasn’t behind. Of course, none of the four had enough time, and soon enough April’s timer went off.
“Splints!” She called, while the four turtles prepared their cookies for showing. “It’s time for—”
THE JUDGING:
Tense and dramatic music played from one of Donnie’s portable speakers as Splinter paced up and down the lineup, hands clasped behind his back. He met each of their gazes unflinchingly, as sweat collected on their foreheads and they tried not to break from the pressure of Splinter’s hard stare.
“Raphael,” Splinter said, starting at the end of the line. “What cookies have you to present today?”
Raph gulped. “Er, chocolate chip cookies.”
“Hm. Basic, but classic.” Splinter reached out, taking a cookie from the plate in front of Raph and slowly bringing it to his mouth. He chewed and swallowed, and, perfectly on cue, Donnie’s music swelled, ominous.
“Very good,” Splinter said, and Raph breathed a sigh of relief. “Chewy, with a good balanced ratio of chocolate chips to dough.” He nodded his approval, swiftly popping the rest of the cookie in his mouth.
“Now,” he said, holding out a hand. April handed him a glass of water and Splinter downed it, swishing it around his mouth while holding eye contact with Donnie. “Donatello,” he said. “What have you decided to make?”
“Sugar cookies,” Donnie said. “I originally was making chocolate cookies, but they burned to a crisp.” He shot Leo a glare, and Leo shrugged.
Splinter nodded, snatching a sugar cookie frosted with the atomic information of gold from the periodic table of elements. “Well. We shall see.” He took a bite, and Donnie leaned forward, fingers ready over his wrist tech to write any notes on reactions.
“Good,” Splinter said, smacking his lips. “Though it does seem to be mostly frosting.”
“Oh.” Donnie shrugged. “They kept falling apart, and so I enhanced the structural integrity with frosting. Five times.”
Leo snorted, and Donnie nearly launched into the second round of twin tussle, only held back by Raph’s hand on his arm.
“Well,” Splinter said, “too much frosting for my taste.” He still polished off the rest of the cookie, however, before moving on to Mikey. “You, my son, must have something incredible to showcase.”
Mikey sighed. “Not really. Just some orange-zest ginger snaps. With sugar, this time.”
Splinter ate the whole cookie in one go, closing his eyes and humming his pleasure. “Delicious,” he sighed happily. “Just the right ratio of orange to ginger, with a crisp crunch and delightful texture. Absolutely delightful.”
Mikey beamed as Splinter slid the whole tray off of the table and set it on his chair.
“Well,” April narrated while handing Splinter another cup of water. “This is it, folks, I think we have a winner. Mikey, for the eighth year in a row, and—”
“HOLD UP,” Leo interrupted. “Splinter hasn’t tried mine yet.”
April smirked. “Okay, Leo. Sure. We’ll hold off on the winner announcement.”
Splinter stepped forward, eyeing Leo’s plate suspiciously. It was covered with a dark blue cloth, hiding whatever was underneath from view. Leo, with a huge smirk, whipped the cloth away, revealing the cookies.
Mikey’s mouth dropped open. “Uhh, Leo?” he asked, more than a little confused. “What are those?”
“I call them,” Leo said, sweeping a hand in the air dramatically. “Cookizzas.”
Silence.
“Cookie pizza,” Leo explained, when it was clear no one had understood. He huffed. “It’s a working name.”
The Cookizzas were strange looking, like someone had taken a regular pizza, squished cookie dough on top of it, shoved it in the oven, and called it good, nay, revolutionary.
“...Interesting,” Splinter said, eyeing the Cookizzas with no small amount of disgust.
“Try before you deny, daddio,” Leo said with a smirk, pushing the plate toward Spinter.
Slowly, Splinter reached for a Cookizza, bringing it to his mouth and taking a bite. The others leaned in, holding their breath. Donnie’s music swelled.
Splinter’s eyes widened. “What–” he breathed. “How—” he blinked, tears collecting in the corners of his eyes. “This is delicious. Leonardo, you did it. You created the best cookie in the entire world.”
Leo preened. “Does that mean I win?”
“Yes!” Splinter nodded, snatching another Cookizza. “You win! You are my favorite son if you make these again!”
“Wait.” Donnie held up a Cookizza, glaring at Leo like he had personally kicked and not kicked his schrodinger’s cat. “How did you make these?”
“With talent,” Leo replied airily, lifting his chin in the air. “You should try it sometime.”
“No, no,” Donnie insisted. “I mean how. I didn’t see any sauce at your station, and we would have smelled pizza.”
“He’s got a point,” Raph said. “Leo, how did you make these?” “They’ve got to be handmade!” Mikey said. “Leo, you broke the rules!”
“No I didn’t!” Leo protested. “They’re homemade…. Just….” He tapped his fingers together, avoiding the other’s gazes. “Not by me?” “Leo,” April said with a stern glare. “Explain.”
Leo rubbed the back of his neck. “Weeeelll… Heuso owed me a favor. So last week we spent a day creating Cookizzas together, but I kept burning them, so I had him make them, and then I portaled them in. So…. Uh….. It’s not against the rules!”
Mikey made a few squeaky sounds like the air leaking out of a balloon.
“Hey!” Leo protested. “It’s still my recipe! By half. Anyway.” He held out the plate desperately. “Try one!”
The others each took a Cookizza, biting into the saucy, doughy treat.
“Leo,” Mikey said, glaring at him. “This is good. How DARE you!”
Leo grinned. “So do I win?”
Splinter stroked his chin, frowning. “Yes,” he finally said, and Leo swelled with pride. “But,” Splinter continued. “Only by half.”
Leo shrugged. “Okay. That’s fair.” He held up the plate. “More Cookizzas, anyone?”