Completing The List

6. Make A Birthday Cake

     Lizzy stared at the next task and at first she seemed really cocky about it. This was a very easy task, she thought to herself, all I going do is bake a cake. How tough could that be? Turns out the Gods of baking had a great sense of humour and proved to her and Anna how tough it could be just to make one single cake. After several failures and a few hundred dollars in wasted groceries, Lizzy finally realized this was not going to be that easy and that they might need some help. "How are we going to get past this?" she cried out, "We have to at least make an edible cake that someone else would eat to complete this job."

     "I'm not sure, but I can tell you this much." Anna said as she gestured towards the latest horrific mass of cake on the counter. "I'm not touching that thing with a ten foot pole."

     "I don't blame you one bit." Lizzy said as she stared at her latest attempt to bake. It was horrible and not in a nice way too. This task from the list was going to be a lot more difficult than she had earlier anticipated.

     "The biggest problem is that the task isn't for you to just bake any cake, but something nice enough to celebrate someone's birthday with."

     "We're finished, there's no way we're going to do this one. Let's move on to the next on the list!" Anna cried, ready to toss in the towel.

     "Never!" Lizzy said with fire in her voice. "We will do this list in order, because this is the way Hayden would have done it."

     "Are you sure about that?" Anna asked.

     "No." Lizzy confessed, "But that's how we're going to do it. Let's do this right."

     "How are we going to do that?" Anna asked as she took her apron off in disgust. "Are we going to hire a ringer to cook it for us?"

     "No, we are going to do all these tasks ourselves. No ringers!" Lizzy paused for a moment, "But that doesn't mean we can't pay someone to teach us how to do it." She looked down at the notebook she was googling with and turned the monitor around for Anna to read: Alfredo's cooking academy. There was full information and numbers for them to call. "There are single night classes that teach specific things to people who are not chefs." She picked up the phone and dialed the number.

     After a few rings, someone finally picked up the line. "Good afternoon, Alfredo's cooking academy. How may I help you?"

     Lizzy paused, nervous to speak. "Yes, I was wondering if there were any classes that could teach someone how to bake a fancy cake."

     "Yes, there is. We have a class specifically made for creating and professionally decorating birthday cakes."

     "Oh my!" Lizzy said as she got excited, "How much to attend that class?"

     "It's one hundred each for a ten class course. Classes are every Tuesday night."

     "Perfect. I'd like to reserve a place for two students." Lizzy said as she whipped out her credit card to put down a deposit for their places. After she made the payment, she was told information would arrive in the mail. About a week later they had course materials, a reading list of the books they needed to buy as well as another list of the materials they needed to bring to class. They had to supply their own kitchenware so that they could bring the pans and other stuff home when they wanted to make stuff for homework. Lizzy for the first time in a while was very excited. She was on a quest to make something rather than investigate and run around looking for answers. She was going to learn how to make a cake and then use that vast knowledge to make it for someone, maybe at a party.

     Lizzy was very excited when they arrived for their first class, but Anna was anything but. She didn't like cooking that much, but was confident that Lizzy would do most of the work, and they would both pass. It was pretty much a flashback to her high school days when Lizzy would do all the work in science class and she just copied the notes and passed. Same would happen here so she wasn't worried. But things got interesting when they arrived to class. There were only twenty people in the class, paired off in groups of two, so naturally Anna clung to Lizzy like always. She was confident that it would work out, they'd make a decent cake and move on.