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“All right!” Cheng Xiaoshi grabbed Lu Guang by the shoulders and steered him toward the kitchen. “I think we’ve got everything we need. Let’s get to work!”
“You want to make a birthday cake for Qiao Ling?” he asked, deadpan. “Here?”
Their little kitchen wasn’t exactly suited for...well, anything beyond the basics. They didn’t even have a real oven, just one of those microwave-sized ones you kept on the counter. That, plus an electric stove top with two burners (one halfway burned out) and you had their entire cooking arrangement. Oh, and a microwave that Qiao Ling had “donated” after graduation.
“Maybe not make,” Cheng Xiaoshi admitted. He finally released Lu Guang and moved over to the small pile of grocery bags on the table. “Maybe more like...decorate.”
Lu Guang watched, eyebrows raised, as Cheng Xiaoshi dove into the bags and began pulling things out. The cake was first—plain white cake with white icing. “You know she’s not really into sweets.”
“All girls like sweets,” Cheng Xiaoshi retorted. “And everyone likes birthday cake. Well, except the people who don’t like cake, I guess—which Qiao Ling isn’t! We just have to make this fit her tastes.” He stood up, a triumphant expression on his face, lifting a small package of strawberries.
Then a kiwi. A quarter of a melon. Blueberries. Two tangerines. More strawberries.
“How much did all of this cost?” Lu Guang asked, watching Cheng Xiaoshi pull a bag of chocolate pieces and a small carton of cream out of the last bag.
“Enough,” he said cheerfully. “Come on, it’ll be worth it, right? She’s gonna be so happy with this cake that she’ll probably cancel our rent for the month—and next month, too.”
Lu Guang sighed. He grabbed the blueberries and strawberries and took them over to the sink to wash while Cheng Xiaoshi tidied away the bags. “So we’re just sticking fruit on the cake?”
“I snuck a peek at her phone a few nights ago. Her Weibo feed was full of stuff like this, see?” He held his phone out, the screen showing pictures of intricate desserts. Lu Guang squinted at it while he dried his hands, letting Cheng Xiaoshi slowly scroll through the pictures.
There were cakes covered with layers of fruit and chocolate, each one more spectacular than the last. Some were decorated with twists and spirals of chocolate, some were more than one layer, or were cut into shapes or had words and phrases written along the side of the cake.
“I figured if I just bought the cake, we could make all the fruit and stuff to go on it,” Cheng Xiaoshi continued. “We can cut it up and dip it in chocolate, like this one, and I bought extra strawberries to kind of push into the sides, you know?”
He nodded slowly. It made sense, but…. “Have you ever done anything like this before?”
“I mean, maybe not this,” Cheng Xiaoshi said with a shrug. “But we’ve got the internet, right? How hard can it be?”
…
“The chocolate’s not sticking,” Lu Guang reported dryly, almost an hour later.
“What? Let me see.” Cheng Xiaoshi crowded in close to him, peering over his shoulder. “Huh.”
He rolled his eyes. Huh, indeed. “I think it’s too wet.”
“Well...yeah, fruit’s wet, but people do this all the time.”
Lu Guang sighed. “Those people aren’t us.”
“Maybe it’s just not hot enough!” Cheng Xiaoshi whisked away the pan of melted chocolate to put back on the good burner. He frowned at it, mumbling to himself, then added another splash of cream. Lu Guang folded his arms, leaned one hip on the table, and watched him work.
“We can just use the fruit,” he suggested.
“It needs chocolate,” his friend protested. “Here, let’s try this now.” Cheng Xiaoshi brought the pan back over to the wooden trivet on the table. “You just take a strawberry, put it on a toothpick, and dip it in like so….”
The strawberry slipped off the toothpick to float in the chocolate. It was clearly mocking them.
“Well, at least this one will be covered,” Cheng Xiaoshi said. He found a fork to scoop the strawberry out, staring at it in disbelief when most of the chocolate just dripped off of it.
“Uh...maybe it’s too thin?” he offered, shooting Lu Guang a panicked look.
Lu Guang met his gaze, unsure whether he should laugh at or commiserate with his friend. “Can we thicken it up?”
“If we put it in the microwave?”
He covered his face with one hand. “Are you asking or telling me?”
“Telling?”
Lu Guang lowered his hand and shook his head. “Plan B?” he asked.
“Uh...we don’t have one?”
He wasn’t surprised. “We should make one,” he clarified.
“Maybe it just needs to cool down,” Cheng Xiaoshi suggested. “Chocolate hardens up as it cools, right? Oh, hang on! I’ve got an idea!” He grabbed Lu Guang’s wrist, turning his hand up to place the sticky, slightly chocolaty strawberry in his palm, and rushed over to the little kitchen’s cabinets.
He was back with a stack of plates before Lu Guang could fully process what was in his hand. “Okay, so like...if dipping them isn’t working...what if we just poured the chocolate over them, right? Let it harden that way?”
Lu Guang finally dropped the strawberry on the table, flexing his sticky hand in disgust. “That won’t work,” he replied, heading over to the sink to wash his hands.
“Sure it will!” Cheng Xiaoshi was already organizing fruit pieces on the plates. “You can take over with the strawberries, if you want. I’ve got this part under control.”
Lu Guang sighed heavily and crossed to the other side of the table. Cheng Xiaoshi had just been removing the stems and cutting the strawberries in half, saying they could just push them into the side of the cake with the cut side facing out. He’d been halfway through the package when the chocolate emergency occurred, and Lu Guang picked up the knife to pick up where Cheng Xiaoshi had left off.
“See, it’s already working,” Cheng Xiaoshi announced. “These are gonna look great.”
…
After another hour, Lu Guang found himself staring down at a roughly circular chocolate plate with pieces of fruit stuck in it. “I told you it wouldn’t work.”
“It worked fine,” Cheng Xiaoshi retorted. “I just have to cut ‘em apart, see?” He’d gotten out one of the bigger knives, and with a whack cracked through the chocolate on one side of the plate. He kept going, chopping out rough chunks of fruit-studded chocolate. “Now we just have to cut it down, like this.”
Lu Guang watched him for a few more seconds as Cheng Xiaoshi whittled away at the chocolate surrounding the fruit, until he finally held up a limp slice of kiwi that was mostly smothered in jagged chocolate. “See?”
“Just do that a hundred more times,” Lu Guang said dryly.
“If you’re not gonna help, start on the cake,” Cheng Xiaoshi replied airily. “You’re just jealous that this is working out exactly as I planned.”
Jealous. Sure. That was it.
Lu Guang rolled his eyes and did as Cheng Xiaoshi said. They’d put the cake in the fridge, to keep it out of the way, and he retrieved it now and set it on the table. He gently removed it from the box and set to pushing the first of the strawberry halves into its side.
The strawberry went in without a problem, squishing into the frosting and staying there, but it displaced more frosting than Lu Guang anticipated. Either he’d pushed too hard or the frosting was too soft, but it squished up around the strawberry. Maybe that wasn’t a problem for one strawberry, but the plan was to cover the entire circumference of the cake.
“Cheng Xiaoshi?”
His friend looked over. He already had a small pile of awkwardly angular, chocolate-smothered fruit on the plate next to him, and was currently trying to extract a segment of tangerine. Lu Guang turned the cake toward him so he could see the way the frosting was squishing up around the strawberry.
“It’ll be fine,” Cheng Xiaoshi announced. “Just keep going. Get as many as you can on there.”
Lu Guang sighed, turning the cake back towards himself. The next strawberry went in, next to the first, and...squish.
Frosting built up between the strawberries as he continued. He made it all the way around the cake with the strawberries facing up, then, at Cheng Xiaoshi’s prompting, made a second layer with the strawberries facing down. It was pretty enough, but some of the frosting had come free and slid down across the cut sides of the strawberries. It mingled with the juices, threatening to melt away and sent some of the strawberries sliding free.
“Maybe spread it back over them?” Cheng Xiaoshi suggested. He’d managed to excavate all the fruit from the chocolate now, and was working on shaping down a few of the more jagged pieces. “Like a glaze?”
It was worth a shot. Lu Guang found a butter knife and set to work scraping the melting frosting over the strawberries. It didn’t want to work, and he almost dislodged a few strawberries as he tried. He figured their best hope for survival was to scrape the offending frosting off and level out the side of the cake that way.
He stared down at the plate and the uneven lumps of frosting around the cake. Cheng Xiaoshi was chopping something again when Lu Guang looked up, so he wouldn’t be any help for this disaster.
Maybe he could turn it into edging along the bottom of the cake? Like the piping that bakeries did? He poked at it with the butter knife, gently smoothing and evening it out around the cake. And...okay, it was an ugly smear of strawberry juice-streaked frosting around the bottom of a cake. Not exactly what you might see at a bakery.
Lu Guang poked at it some more, fighting to clean it up and at least smooth it down. He couldn’t do much more than a flat ribbon of icing in the end, but it was still better than where he’d started.
“All done?” Cheng Xiaoshi asked brightly. The cutting board was covered with chopped and shredded chocolate, and his hands were practically brown with the stuff. “I figured we could decorate with the extra. The grater was too big for this, but I think I chopped it fine enough.”
“That could work,” Lu Guang agreed. He pulled the cutting board over as Cheng Xiaoshi circled around behind him with the plate of fruit. While Cheng Xiaoshi placed the chocolate-covered fruit pieces (as they were) on top of the cake, Lu Guang used the leftover chocolate to hide his pathetic icing ribbon around the bottom of the cake. The rest of the chocolate got added to the top of the cake to fill in the gaps between the fruit, whether that was little curls sprinkled in here and there or larger pieces stuck right into the frosting.
The end result was...something.
“She’ll like it,” Cheng Xiaoshi said, staring down at their lopsided creation. “She’ll definitely like it. It comes from the heart, right?”
Lu Guang rested a hand on his shoulder, but didn’t reply. If it was anyone other than Qiao Ling he might have his doubts...but he was confident she’d see the love that went into this instead of the imperfections.
Probably. Maybe. At least she wouldn’t laugh in their faces.
…
Qiao Ling burst out laughing when she saw the cake. “How did you even do this?” she asked in between giggles. “Did you make the whole cake?”
“Well, we bought the cake. The fruit and stuff, we...we did that,” Cheng Xiaoshi admitted.
She was still giggling, but there was a big smile on her face. “It looks fantastic...wait, don’t cut it yet, I need pictures!”
“Is the laughing good?” Cheng Xiaoshi whispered to Lu Guang.
“You tell me,” he whispered back.
“I’m sending this to Shanshan...she keeps promising to make me a cake, but she never follows through. Guess you have her beat this time!”
“Yeah? You like it?” Cheng Xiaoshi asked hopefully.
Qiao Ling squeezed in between the him and Lu Guang to wrap her arms around their shoulders. “I love it. Now, who’s gonna cut me a piece?”