A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking

by T. Kingfisher

It was amazing. Terror cannot actually stand up to a full bladder. I was about to be hauled up on murder charges, and all I could think about was oh god I have to go so baaaaad…

mood

I don’t know how much blood costs out here, come to think of it—we don’t use it much in baking—but

Much????

“Ex-excuse me…?” I said stupidly, as if I’d caught him manhandling the baguettes or trying to open the bakery case. Not trying to stab me. Trying to stab me probably deserved something other than “excuse me” but my mind didn’t seem to be working.

One ran into the gingerbread man’s card house and got thrown out the window. My cookie had a temper.

It’s kind of sad when you’ve got an evil wizard tied up at your feet, a dead man in the next room, the monarch of the kingdom pacing the floor and you’re waiting to instigate a coup that will throw out a traitor to the kingdom…and you realize you’re bored.

I dropped the scone into Bob’s bucket. He glopped happily over it. I think that might have been cannibalism.

If you have ever prepared for a siege in two days, then you know what the next few days were like. If you haven’t, then you probably don’t. Well…a big formal wedding is about the same (and because we do cakes, I’ve been on the periphery of a few), except that if things go wrong in a siege you’ll all die horribly, and in formal weddings, the stakes are much higher. We had a bride threaten to set the bakery on fire once when her buttercream frosting came out the wrong color.

There was something stuck in his teeth. Here I was about to die, stabbed to death by a deranged wizard, and that was what I noticed—there was something green stuck in his teeth.

And because I was really going to die, right this minute, and it didn’t much matter anymore, I said, “You’ve got something stuck in your teeth.” He blinked. I guess this is not the sort of thing that people say when you’re about to stab them. “What?” “In your teeth. Um. Sort of green—” “What is wrong with you?”