Candy Apple’s Cooking Channel
Admiral Biscuit
“Hello everypony!” Waving to a camera was weird, even after all this time.
She’d gotten used to it—she’d gotten used to a lot of things here on Earth. And she did have conversations with her viewers, they were just on a screen and not face-to-face, which was a shame.
“If you’re new here, welcome! Click the like and subscribe and click the bell for notifications—I have to say that or else the robots at YouTube get mad.” Candy Apples wrinkled her muzzle. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” she added.
“This is Candy’s Cooking Channel, and today we’re gonna be making a pizza! You humans have so many great kinds of pizzas, it’s very confusing. Not just the variety of toppings: there are thin crust and deep crusts and pan pizzas and Chicago style and stuffed crust—that’s when there’s a ring of cheese at the edge.”
Some YouTube cooking channels had a dedicated kitchen studio, set up for filming. Depending on the channel, it might feature the latest gadgets, or it might be a more average kitchen that anybody might have—if it was a specialty channel, it might have a decidedly antique vibe. She’d learned that Townsend’s kitchen was foreign to most humans, but vaguely familiar to her. Modern homes in Ponyville had standalone stoves, but some of the old farmhouses still used a hearth for cooking.
Candy Apple’s kitchen was what she got when she rented her apartment. It wasn’t as fancy as some, but for a pony coming from a farm where running water was an expensive luxury and hot water was something you made over the fire, it was incredibly fancy.
And incredibly confusing at first, and that had gotten the wheels turning in her head. She could cook on a stove and she could cook in a hearth, but what was a pony to make of a dial that went from 1 to 10, or ‘melt’ to ‘hi’? Especially since there was no flame, just a glowy ring under a glass cover? Not to mention, while many ponies knew how to make food from scratch, how were they to approach the plethora of frozen foods that grocery stores offered?
Thus her YouTube channel was born.
Candy Apple had a tablet perched on the edge of the counter, where she could read comments from her live audience: it was almost like they were there in her kitchen, instead of somewhere out in the world. Sometimes the messages scrolled by so fast she couldn’t read them all, while special messages with money stayed on the screen for a while.
She hadn’t meant to get enough viewers to make money from her channel, she’d just wanted to help ponies out. That didn’t stop her from cashing the checks.
“Fluffaluff wants to know if I’ve heard of Detrot—Detroit pizza? I know about Detroit, it’s a bad Cleveland.” She turned away from the camera, and reached for her fridge. “I don’t know if I’d trust a pizza from there." Then she reconsidered and turned back to the camera. “I forgot to say—since there’s a lot of pizzas you have to decide what you like, what kind of style you want and what kind of toppings you want. Otherwise it’s really overwhelming. And there are different kinds of sauces, too; there’s tomato-based sauce and white sauce, which are like pasta sauces. Also there’s BBQ sauce. That’s an abbreviation for barbeque, which is a way of cooking food over an open fire. If you don’t have an open fire you can kind of get the flavor with the sauce. I think; I haven’t compared. Sometimes dessert pizzas have sugar drizzle instead of sauce, Cici’s makes them—if you’re not sure what kind of pizza you might like you can try Cici’s, they have a pizza buffet with lots of combinations of toppings and sauces.”
She stood up on her hind hooves and opened her freezer, pulling out a box. “This is a DiGiorno’s pizza, it’s spinach, mushroom, and garlic. It has a white sauce and a rising crust.” Candy Apples set it on the counter. “Like a lot of human foods, the box has instructions on it.” She turned it to face the camera. “I’m supposed to leave it in the freezer until the oven is pre-heated to four hundred degrees, or 205 Celsius. But it won’t melt on the counter.
“You can open the ends of the box, that’s the way you’re supposed to get in. But first—” Candy Apples turned to face her stove, and put her hooves on the edge as she reached for the dial. “Make sure your cooktop is cold before putting hooves or hands on it. My stove has a little orange light to tell me if it’s hot, in case I forget.” She swished her tail as she leaned over and twisted the knob. “If you’re cooking a lot of stuff at the same time, it’s smart to plan access to the control panel.”
A notification from her tablet got her attention. “Aww, ElonMuskrat, thanks for the donation! And the question—ElonMuskrat wants to know if it hurts if I put a hoof on the stove. Depends.” She lifted a hoof up for the camera. “The shoe can’t feel anything, and the walls of my hoof aren’t sensitive, but my frog is a little bit.” She picked up a pen with her mouth and tapped her frog. “But I could get my shoe hot and then touch myself somewhere and that would hurt.”
Candy Apples turned back to the stove and used a wooden spoon to push the buttons on the stove. “There we go, now we have to wait for the oven to warm up, so I’m going to open up the pizza and show you what you’re going to get.”
She used a knife in her teeth to slit the end of the package open and dumped the pizza out on the counter, then angled the camera down. “It comes wrapped in plastic, to keep all the toppings on. Sometimes there’s a spot where you can pull the plastic apart, other times you have to cut it off. They usually come on cardboard discs but not always, and sometimes they come in pans that you’re supposed to cook them in. It’ll tell you in the instructions on the box.
“Depending on what kind of pizza you got and how well-frozen it was, the toppings might have slid off. My grocery store likes packing them on end, and if I don’t get them home fast enough a lot of the toppings slide to one edge of the pizza. You can just push them back where they should be—there’s a picture on the box if you’re not sure.”
Her notification bell chimed again. “Thanks for the donation, sixties-spiderman. ‘Do we have pizzas in Equestria?’ Yes, a lot of different varieties, although they don’t go by that name. Various kinds of flatbreads with other ingredients baked in or put on top. A lot of ponies don’t like tomato sauce, and some tribes don’t like cheese.
“Now the instructions in the box say to put the pizza directly on the center rack, which is what we’re going to do. A lot of ovens have moveable racks, which you’ll want to have done before you preheat the oven. But you can also put the pizza on—bigbuffetboy85 wants to know why some tribes don’t like cheese. I don’t know, I like cheese. I think they’re wrong . . . but I wouldn’t eat a fish and a pegasus would.”
Candy Apple’s ears perked as the oven timer beeped. “There it is, all pre-heated. Make sure you remember to take the plastic off, and that the oven’s hot. I’ve got an oven paddle—humans sell them as pizza paddles, but they work for putting all sorts of things in the oven and pulling it back out again.
“Or, I could use my oven rack hook—you can have a craftsmare make one, or you can buy them on Amazon.” She turned around and opened a cabinet drawer, then pulled out a wooden hook and turned her head to show it to the camera.
“I like to always have a towel draped over my oven door pipe; it’s a reminder to wipe your hooves and muzzle, and also useful for pulling the door open.” She tugged the door down, remembered to re-aim the camera, then pulled the wire rack out with the tool.
Candy Apples set the pizza on the rack, then pushed it back in with the toe of her shoe. “Don’t do this if you’re a human.” She pushed the door back shut and turned to face the camera again. “Remember that the box says you’re supposed to cook it for twenty four to twenty seven minutes. Your oven should have a timer on it, or you can set one on your microwave or on your telephone—I’ve got one that sticks to the door of my electric icebox that’s easy to use.” She turned to her refrigerator door and dialed it to the correct time.
“Now while we wait for the pizza to cook, I should talk a little bit about my sponsor!” Candy Apples picked up a cue card. “Have you ever wanted to be nobility? With Established Titles, you can be! Scottish law has a rule that anypony—anybody—who owns land on a Scottish estate gets to be called a Lord or Lady. You can buy it for yourself or for a family member or a loved one. Some of the proceeds will be used to plant trees, and you’ll get a certificate describing your land. I’ve got one—hold on.” Candy Apples turned tail and headed out of the kitchen; a moment later the camera recorded a few bumps and bangs from the living room, and then she was back, proudly holding a framed certificate. “Like this. And you’ll get a discount if you use my promotional code, ‘CandyCC.’ It doesn’t say here if you’re allowed to visit your land or do anything with it, but I’m sure they wouldn’t mind.”
Candy Apples set the framed certificate down on her countertop. “You humans have weird customs. If just owning land made you a noble, nearly all earth ponies would be. Back home we only get nobility if we’re born into it or gifted it by another noble . . . or if we become an alicorn.”
She turned her attention back to her feed. “Thanks for the donation, Vivzie! Vivzie wants to know how you become an alicorn? We only know of two times it’s happened; Princess Twilight Sparkle did a very difficult spell and saved Equestria, and that’s how she became an alicorn. We don’t know what Princess Cadance did, nopony has ever said. And Flurry Heart was born an alicorn.
“GPT44Xbot, I don’t think that the Princesses can bestow wings and horns on a pony . . . I don’t know, though, maybe they can. I think it would be very strange to suddenly be an alicorn. There are spells to make butterfly wings or to turn a pony into a breezie.”
Candy Apples leaned in to the screen, trying to catch some more messages scrolling by. Just then, her notification rang again. “PILF_Hunter, you want to see my oven rack tool again? Hold on.” She turned around and opened the drawer again, pulling it out before turning back to face the camera. “It’s not anything too fancy, just a piece of hardwood I commissioned a craftsmare to make for me. You want the handle to be comfortable in the mouth or in your hands, and of course the hook has to be able to grab the rack.” She turned around again to put it away, then checked the timer on the fridge. “Only a couple minutes left until it’s done—I’ve found that my oven usually cooks faster, so I’ll want to take it out at twenty four minutes.
“Who does the braids and bows in my mane, Impetus? I do, it’s not hard when you know how. The bows just clip in.” She lifted up a braid with her hoof and unclipped a yellow bow. “That keeps everything in place, and they’ll just pull out if I get my mane caught in something—you never know when you’re working on a farm.”
“Now’s a good time to remember a cooling rack. My oven has a little compartment at the bottom where I can keep them.” Candy Apples turned around and bent down to slide open the drawer. “All sorts of little trays fit down there.” There was some rummaging and metal clattering before she popped her head back up, a wire rack in her mouth.
“A baking tray or a pizza stone might be a better choice, but I don’t have one that the pizza will fit. Or a wooden cutting board.” Her ears turned as the kitchen timer started ringing. “Ooh, pizza’s done, I can’t wait to see what it looks like.”
She pulled the oven door open and held the cooling rack under the oven rack. “You can slide the pizza out with a hoof or a utensil, be careful of your balance. You don’t want to tip the pizza over.”
Candy Apples turned and presented her DiGiorno pizza to the camera—sort of to the camera. Only one corner was visible until she angled the camera down again, then set her hooves proudly on the countertop.
“It’s gotta cool for five minutes before you can eat it,” she said. “But it smells so good, and the crust looks nice. All the cheese is melted . . . I don’t know if I should cut it before it cools or after it does.” She turned to get her pizza cutter and poked the pizza with it experimentally. “Probably after, the cheese is too soft right now. I’ll have to set on something other than the wire rack, too.
“I should probably set my timer again.” Candy Apples turned and put five minutes on her timer. “There we go. Verplichtend wants to know if I’ve ever had a pizza from a real pizzaria—yes, I’ve ordered pizzas for delivery to my apartment and I’ve gone to pizza restaurants.” She looked back at the screen as a new comment came in. “No, MintyLovesSocks, I’m not going to rank them; everypony has different tastes.” She turned around and rummaged under her oven, then turned around with a baking sheet in her mouth.
She held it over the pizza, estimating its size. “That’s too small . . . I don’t have a big enough cutting board.” A ping from her tablet got her attention. “Uh . . . use the pizza box?” She looked back at the counter, where the empty pizza box still sat. “That’s a great idea, Yesterdaisy.”
Candy Apples grabbed the empty pizza box just as the timer rang. She slid the pizza onto the box, rolling the pizza cutter through it and making eight neat slices. “The box says that I should cut it into six slices . . . some pizzas say they should be cut into five slices—you don’t have to follow those instructions, you can make as many pieces as you like.” She picked up a slice and held it up to the camera. “Let’s try it.”
She took two bites before setting the slice back down on the box. “Delicious . . . I think it could have used another minute or so in the oven. Or maybe the toppings are too wet, sometimes it’s hard to get the right texture with wet foods. Well, that’s it for today! Thanks for the donations, thanks to everypony for watching, and come by next week when we’re gonna cook Hot Pockets!”
