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Baking: Sweet and Savory | Monday, 3rd period

"Good morning," Hannibal said when everybody had arrived. "My apologies for last week; I was rather under the weather. This week, we'll be working on something simple and from someplace other than Europe, as requested." He smiled and nodded at the students who'd requested those things.

"Mochi is a traditional Japanese food - it can be a snack on its own, or it can be combined with other things. I have a number of examples here. It has only a few ingredients, and is fairly simple to start, though you do need to be precise and careful."

He pulled up the recipe on one wall and went over it with them. "You may make the plain version, or dress it up however you like. Please feel free to ask me questions if you have them."

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The sound Cosette made should probably not have been humanly possible.

"Oh, look at the little bears! I don't know that I can make them as fancy as all that --" she indicated the ones with the most elaborate artwork on them -- "but little animals I can try to do."

That...was quite some noise, yes. That was what you got for showing adorable things to a teenage girl, Hannibal.

"I thought you might enjoy that." He chuckled. "Let me know if you'd like some help." The cutesy things weren't exactly his style, but he could certainly help her if she wanted to make them.

"You don't strike me as someone well suited to that kind of artwork," Cosette told him, "so I'll only ask if I absolutely have to."

"It wouldn't be my preference," Hannibal admitted, "but I can show you what to do. Though I suspect you could be quite good at it yourself, if you wanted to."

"Perhaps," Cosette allowed. "We shall see how much I enjoy it, first, shall we? Suppose you show me a bit about how to start decorating these, and I'll see how well I figure things out from there?"

"I would be happy to." Hannibal went to program some new things into the room and returned with paintbrushes of varying sizes. He got some of the food coloring and set it nearby, too. "Where would you like to start? The bears?"

"Yes, I think that's a nice place to start," Cosette decided, with a nod. "They're already brown as it is so I won't have to start all over with a new batch just yet."

"True." Hannibal reached for one of Cosette's mochi. "May I?"

Cosette gestured toward the mochi with a nod. "Please, Monsieur."

Hannibal nodded his thanks and picked it up. "If we put a bit of the flour on the outside," he demonstrated, "That will give a better contrast. And it keeps it from being too sticky. You can use these," he opened the food coloring and put a few drops on a plate, "with the flour to thicken them, so they don't run. And it will give them a bit of dimension."

He mixed some of the colorings together to get black, adding a bit of the flour to get a paste. "Then you paint." He grabbed a paintbrush and made a couple dots for eyes. "Those bears also use a piece of extra mochi for the noses. Just form it into a circle; you can tack it on with some of the paste."

Edited 2015-02-09 23:18 (UTC)

"Almost like sculpting things out of clay, a bit," Cosette said, half-distractedly since she was trying to pay close attention and mold little mochi noses for the bears. "Only much tastier in the end, I should think."

She carefully shaped three or four little mochi circles for noses before saying, "The sisters might have said this was playing with our food, and we oughtn't do that, but I don't think it is. It's not as if they're made to look this way to prevent people from wanting to eat them."

"Much tastier, unless something is very wrong," Hannibal agreed. "And properly decorated food is a pleasure to eat. Though perhaps a bit decadent for your sisters." He'd gathered they weren't much for extraneous pleasures.

"I'm fairly certain everything I've ever learned to make in your classes would have been too decadent for them," Cosette admitted with a laugh. "But they are nuns, after all. There's no reason the rest of us can't enjoy food that's good and nice to look at."

Hannibal laughed, too. "Very true. It just leaves more for us."

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Baking: Sweet and Savory | Monday, 3rd period

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