Author's Note
I've never made these myself, but I've been present while they're being made.
Delicious lumps
“You’d like a what?”
“An Eccles cake.”
“I know what a cake is, but what was that first word again?”
“Eccles?”
“Gesundheit.”
Charlie frowned. He had the distinct impression that he and Pinkie were talking at cross purposes. Certainly, he wasn’t anywhere closer to getting his hands on an Eccles cake, which had kind of been his whole motivation on coming to see Pinkie in the first place.
Well, most of his motivation. Almost all of it. The majority of it.
Were anyone to ask.
Certainly he would be very quick - and vehement! - to deny the suggestion of any other reason why he’d been quite so speedy and quite so keen to go see Pinkie. This was purely about pastry. Nothing else.
He had not been missing her since saying goodbye the previous day. That would be absurd.
Pinkie was also frowning, balanced on her hind legs behind the counter, one hoof on it for balance while the other scratched her head. As happy as she had been to see Charlie coming in through the door - there had been a sudden upswing of happiness from her baseline level of unrelenting cheerfulness - his request had caught her off-guard and confused her.
She had never heard of the things he was talking about.
“Eccles cakes,” Charlie repeated, as though this might help. “They’re, uh, well, I like them and I just sort of fancied one and kind of thought that maybe you might have some and yeah.”
He hadn’t thought the process through much more than that.
Pinkie tapped her chin a couple times, still confused, but then the light dawned. She gasped! Her eyes widened! She very nearly fell over backwards!
Once she’d gone through all that she leaned in over the counter to whisper conspiratorially:
“Ooh! Ooh! Is this a human thing?”
Her whispering was a little odd to Charlie, who’d had to bend down to hear her.
“Uh, yeah, I guess. If you guys don’t have them and you never heard of them then I suppose they must-” he said, but did not get a chance to finish.
“Ooh! Tell me tell me! What are they? I wanna know!”
Pinkie, as with most of the ponies who Charlie hung around with, nurtured a fervent curiosity about the world he’d come from. Even the things that inexplicably turned out to be more-or-less the same were a source of wonder to her - what were the odds, after all? But the stuff that was different or had no clear analogue was best, obviously. Because it was new and exciting!
“Uh, right, well, it’s basically pastry and you put currants in it and fold the pastry over so you get this...ball, kind of, of pastry filled with currants. Then you squash it a little. Or it just collapses. Point is it’s not meant to be a ball, it’s meant to be kind of a flat-ish lump. Then you bake them.”
Speaking for himself, Charlie was actually more of a fan of the Chorley cake, but felt that getting into the minutiae could wait. One step at a time.
Pinkie stared at him as though expecting the next step but there was no next step. That was it.
“Are there sprinkles?” She asked, hopefully to get him moving in the right direction.
“What? Hundreds and thousands? Uh, no, not that I’m aware of.”
“Oh,” she said, disappointed. Then, perking up again: “How about frosting? Do you frost them?” She suggested, in case Charlie had maybe forgotten this part.
He had not, because this was not a part.
“No. Well, you could, I guess? Not sure why you would, but sure, if you wanted. Some people put sugar on top but I think that’s perverse. Would you want to frost them?”
“It’s frosting,” she said, as though he’d been the one asking stupid questions.
Charlie found himself being stared down by Pinkie, who seemed to be silently daring him to suggest that not frosting something could be seen as a better idea than frosting something. Clearly he wasn’t mad enough to chance this, and so he had to look away, coughing nervously and taking a step away from the counter.
“I’ll not deny it’s an interesting idea but when me and mother used to make them it was just pastry and the filling, nice and simple,” he said.
“If you know how to make them why are you asking me?” Pinke asked, fairly reasonably, head cocked.
“Because I think they’d be better if you were the one who’d made them,” Charlie said, clarifying: “Because you’re good at making things like that, I mean. Really good. The best, in fact.”
This represented a certain amount of quick-thinking on Charlie’s part, though it also happened to be true as far as he was concerned.
It was by definition somewhat difficult to tell when Pinkie went pinker, but she did seem to. Sort of. Could have just been the light.
“D’aww, you! You’ll make me blush!” She said, hoof to her chest.
“I’m just saying, you’re notably dab hand with the baked goods. Dab hoof, I suppose. Certainly, your results would be better than mine would be!”
“Oh, I’m sure you’re super-good at it!”
“Well I wouldn’t go that far. I’m adequate. I know what I’m doing, at least.”
This sort of masturbartory back-and-forth ‘No you’re the best’ one-upmanship looked set to keep going until both sides keeled over, but then a thought popped into Pinkie’s head, as such thoughts were wont to do from time to time.
“That gives me an idea…” She said, eyes narrowing as she processed the thought. Charlie looked down at her, bemused.
“Oh yeah?” He asked.
By then Pinkie had quite latched onto her idea and had hopped down onto all fours again, bouncing sideways along the length of the counter and then bouncing out and around it to come to a - bouncing - halt just in front of Charlie, whereupon she grinned up at him, blue eyes bright.
“Yeah. You’ve got the know-how, I’ve got the can-do - if we worked together we’d have the whole package!” She announced.
At that moment their brains were going in two entirely different directions, so whatever it was she might have been driving at was lost on Charlie, who had to blink so as to not just keep staring at those aforementioned bright blue eyes.
“...what?” He asked. Pinkie giggled.
“For your Eckles cakes!”
Charlie couldn’t put his finger on it but he was sure she’d put the wrong letter into that somehow. He just got an inexplicable feeling.
“Oh, uh, right. What?”
Pinkie - without seeming to actually cross any of the intervening space - wound herself around Charlie’s neck and gesticulated fiercely as she explained herself:
“I’ll make them, and you’ll tell me how to make them, and I’ll make them!”
This time he actually got it, or at least got enough of it to grasp what it was Pinkie was driving at. He would serve as a living recipe book, and she would do the actual work. He guessed?
“Uh, sure, sounds like a plan. Guess I can remember how it’s done. But don’t you need to do actual work or something?” He asked, gesturing to the - admittedly deserted - establishment the pair of them were stood in as Pinkie unwound herself backwards and dismounted.
“Oh no, the place closed early, like, an hour ago,” she said dismissively, trotting towards the back, where the magic happened. Charlie followed, at a loss, feeling that events wouldn’t let him do anything other than follow even if he hadn’t wanted to.
“What? Then why are you still here? Why did you let me in?”
She giggled.
“Because I was closing up, silly! And because I like you.”
Charlie most certainly did not experience a lurch in his gut when he head those words. There was a lurch, yes, but it was unrelated. He and Pinkie were friends, this was well-known. Pinkie was friends with everybody! So the lurch had been unrelated.
As unrelated as the smile that spread across his face.
“Perks, huh?” He asked, eyebrow raised. Pinkie raised hers too, though for no obvious reason and to rather unclear effect.
“Yep!”
“Well then, guess we should get cracking. Uh, for the pastry it’s flour and butter and you’ll want-”
“Spare the details! I’ll handle those! Just keep listing things!” Pinkie said. While Charlie hadn’t been paying attention - e.g. when he’d turned away for maybe a second or so - she’d acquired an apron and already got messy. He accepted this as part of the process and proceeded to keep rattling off what ingredients he remembered being involved.
In a very roundabout way the whole thing did work out.
At the very least, by the time they finished there were things that resembled Eccles cakes where previously there had been nothing that resembled Eccles cakes, so it was by that measure a success.
Agreeably, during the process it might have looked more like organised chaos, with Charlie standing off to one side offering half-remembered instructions while Pinkie flash-stepped about the place filling in the blanks herself, but that was by the by. Results were results, ends justified the means and all that.
And the results were, as said, plain to see, piled high on a plate on the countertop.
Why they weren’t on a in neat rows on a rack was another of those things Charlie just let pass by. He wasn’t a baker, neither was he a brightly coloured horse barely contained by rules or, indeed, reality itself.
“Ooh,” Pinkie said and not for the first time, rising slowly up from beneath a kitchen counter, eyeing the arrayed, gently cooling cakes. Charlie was standing back to one side, spattered with flour and pebbledashed with raisins and still busy catching his breath.
“That worked out,” he said.
“They do look like lumps,” Pinkie observed, very slowly moving a hoof in as if to poke one, only to decide against it at the last minute and pull back again.
“They look delicious,” Charlie said.
Pinkie was moving in another hoof, this time from a different side, still eyeing the cakes closely as though they might try to escape.
“So lumpy…” she said, quietly.
And then her eyes lit up and she stood, twisting around to face Charlie head-on, suddenly all uncertainty.
“You alright there Pinkie?” He asked, experiencing minor concern at this volte face.
“Could I - could I frost one?”
She’d asked this in the hushed tones of someone afraid The Powers That Be might burst in to stop her fun, which was endearing. Charlie smiled warmly at her and did consider patting her mane but held off, because his hands were far too sticky for that.
“You can frost whatever you like, Pinkie,” he said.
From the outside, that would sound like a very strange euphemism, he was sure. But he knew what she meant.
Pinkie, ecstatic, bounced up high enough to give Charlie a singular peck on the cheek before squeaking happily and pulling a frosting bag from somewhere no frosting bag could possibly have been concealed.
Not that Charlie was really paying attention to details like that at that point.
