Chapter 35 — Concerning the Gingerbread Man Holocaust & Elf Chef Yuika’s Recipe for Cookies

The horror of the Biblically accurate angels stuck with Peter for over a day. His mind was still troubled as he ate dinner in the hall— or rather sat with a spoon raised to his lips, not eating, but staring vacantly ahead. He trembled and lay wide awake in his bed, his imminent mortality weighing heavily on his mind. Lost in his terrible thoughts and wandering aimlessly like a zombie, he had gone past the kitchen when the door swung open and Master Chef Yuika poked her head out. The scent of toasted marshmallows hung about her like a sickly sweet ghost. Her hair was pinned up like an explosion of blonde and her brow was furrowed from kitchen rage— the most potent fury known to elfkind.

“Peter, there you are. Get in here.”

Without saying a word Peter followed her inside. The kitchen was a clockwork ballet of chefs prepping and peeling and kneading, sauteing, baking, steaming, frying, and mixing. Knives knocked on cutting boards, flames spewed to the ceiling, the flour hung in the air like snow, and a comically tall stack of pans accumulated in the sink. Yuika handed Peter a white jacket and he put it on as she rolled up her sleeves.

“You okay, Peter? You seem a little out of it.”

“The messengers,” Peter said. “Colossal heralds of heaven. My mortal brain cannot even begin to fathom their incomprehensible power.”

Yuika nodded as if she understood and was concerned, but her silence and lack of reaction told a different tale. She clapped her hands together.

“Right. Today we’re making pfeffernüsse cookies. It’s a simple, rustic Christmas recipe from Germany, first made by Johann Fleischmann in 1753. So it’s kind of a new recipe, but it’s an excellent spice cookie, and one of my favorites. Have you ever had pfeffernüsse before? Peter?”

The words coming out of Yuika’s mouth were shadowed by haunting visions of the messengers and the dread of an imminent doom.

“Peter.” Yuika whacked a rolling pin on the counter top like a conductor with a baton. “Peter. Let’s focus.”

“Yeah?”

“Have you ever had pfeffernüsse before?”

“No.”

“Oh.” Yuika smiled and idly rocked the rolling pin back and forth across the counter with glee. “So I guess you could say I’m going to take your pfeffernüsse virginity today.”

“Yeah, I— what?”

Yuika blushed madly and buried her head in her hands to hide a tremendous smile.

“Let’s start, shall we?! Now remember, we are making cookies for 50,000 elves, and who is going to eat just one cookie? So we want to make at least five per elf. So we’re going to take the recipe and multiply it by 5,000. That should yield about 250,000 cookies. Here are the ingredients.”

Like a deranged butcher, Yuika brandished a great knife and gutted an enormous bag of sugar. She hefted the thing up onto her shoulder, and dumped the snowy powder all into a cast iron witch’s cauldron.

“So sixty-seven grams of sugar times five-thousand is 335,000 grams of sugar. We’ll need about seventy-three of these bags.”

“Are you sure that’s going to fit?” Peter asked. Each bag was about ten pounds worth of sugar. If they emptied seventy-three of them it would make a mountain of sugar going all the way up into the ceiling.

“No worries. It’s a magic cauldron,” Yuika said. “Never overflows. If we used normal pots and pans this kitchen would have be a hundred times bigger.”

Peter spent the next half hour just opening bags of sugar and dumping them one by one into the cauldron. It would have taken longer without a bucket brigade of elves feeding sugar into the endless cauldron. When the bags of sugar were gone, a forklift delivered another pallet full of sugar bags, and they resumed their work. Then came the brown sugar, then the barrels of honey, and the coconut milk.

“What is a splash times 5,000?” Peter asked.

“A touch less than twenty gallons. Just eyeball it,” Yuika said.

“I don’t think I can eyeball twenty gallons.”

“You’re killing me, Peter!”

Once that was in they added the spices. In no time the air they breathed was laced with cinnamon and nutmeg and all the peppery nutty aromas of the west and east Indies. Peter’s nostrils burned and his eyes watered as if each emptied bag of spice were releasing a cloud of pepper spray into his face. Yuika seemed unbothered by the dried capsaicin hanging in the air about their faces. In fact she enjoyed taking a big whiff of each spice just before it was dumped in.

“You know, Peter, nutmeg is an aphrodisiac,” Yuika said.

Peter blinked and blinked so the tears could flush the powdered pepper out of his eyes.

“Do elves not have tear ducts?”

Yuika leaned in close to Peter and whispered, “I put in extra nutmeg just for you.” Face red and madly embarrassed at her own boldness, she turned away and giggled. “WHERE IN THE HOLLY JOLLY HELL IS MY WHISK— oh there it is.”

[Rooyal Rooad Rooyal Rooad Rooyal Rooad Whipstopher Pippinsticks Rooyal Rooad Rooyal Rooad Rooyal Rooad]

Over a low heat Yuika whisked the ingredients together until they formed a brown slurry. Peter wondered how many hours they would be whisking, but after a few minutes a nougaty Christmas aroma rose from the cauldron, and she jangled the whisk clean.

“Ready for the next step.”

Hands covered with heat proof mittens, Peter and Yuika hefted the cauldron off the fire and placed it onto the table. In went the rest of the ingredients, which required no less than five forklifts stacked full of flour and another bucket brigade of elves dumping the powder into the bottomless cauldron. Peters hands and arms were tired from all the opening and lifting, but then Yuika handed him a comically large wooden spoon and said, “Now we need some muscles.”

Peter went about mixing everything together, both hands gripping the spoon and not stirring so much as he was rowing the ingredients together. While the cauldron never overflowed, it did cough a white powder now and again up into Peter’s face. Every now and then he lifted the spoon up from the cauldron’s abyss and Yuika would poke at the dough. First it was white, then it was a shaggy light brown, and finally a clumpy brown dough. Yuika clapped her hands together and shouted, “All hands on deck! Fresh pfeffernüsse cookie dough!”

The counter top was cleared all the way from their workstation to the end of the kitchen. It was sterilized and wiped clean, then Peter and Yuika, like a pair of rugby players, braced their shoulders and hands against the cauldron and pushed all their weight into it until it toppled over. An endless tsunami of pfeffernüsse cookie dough tumbled out onto the counter, and the elves set about rolling it all the way down the table, stopping it from falling onto the floor.

“PICK UP THE PACE!” Yuika shouted all the way to the back of the room, then she turned to Peter. “Now we chill the dough. A human refrigerator would take about a day to do that, but we have another method. EVERYONE CLEAR! YETI’S BREATH INCOMING!”

Yuika put a hand on Peter’s chest and pushed him away from the counter. All the elves stood back, hands up in the air. Two elves covered from head to toe in metallic hazard suits entered from the refrigerator with what appeared to be barrels of liquid nitrogen. They ladled the chilled and smokey substance over the pfeffernüsse dough, and Peter could see the temperature change as white frost bloomed and melted away on the surface of the dough. For a moment he thought it was just normal liquid nitrogen until a miniature snowstorm apparated from nowhere and chilled the very air above the counter tops.

Yuika poked at the dough carefully, testing its texture and firmness.

“Now all we have to do is roll them up into balls.”

Faster than the flash of a creepshot, Yuika pinched off some dough, rolled it between her palms, and deposited a dozen perfect spheres onto a baking sheet. Her hands were like hummingbird wings, flying through the air so fast they buzzed. Peter mimicked her, but at a much more human pace. For every thirty that Yuika made he only made one.

She thought he was joking and laughed. “Okay, for real now.”

Peter doubled his speed, but it was still a pathetic display of dexterity.

“Are you joking?” Yuika said. “Do it like me.”

“I can’t!”

Peter looked down the assembly line and saw the pfeffernüsse was vanishing into spheres. Yuika tilted her head back and sighed heavily at Peter’s ineptitude.

“You’re bloody joking!”

Then she stood behind Peter, rested her chin on his shoulder, and thread her arms under his own. Their hands came together, hers over his, and then very slowly she guided him towards the dough, pinched, rolled, and tossed a finished ball. Then they did it again, more quickly, and again, and again. It was like Peter’s hands were enchanted into a perfect rhythm.

“You’re hopeless,” Yuika said. “Absolutely hopeless. You’re so slow! Don’t you want to be my darling assistant chef forever?” Her lips brushed against his ear as she spoke softly into it. Her breasts crushed firmly against his back. Was this sexual harassment? Peter wondered. It couldn’t be, because it felt wonderful. “We can bake cookies or whatever you like every day.”

“Corner!”

“Behind! Behind! Behind!”

A crash of shattered glass broke across the kitchen. Peter and Yuika snapped out of their romantic moment and saw a poor pastry elf with sleeves smeared in chocolate take a tumble. The platter she carried exploded like a volcano and from it rained down a storm of gingerbread men. Peter expected to see the perfectly frosted and gumdropped cookies splat on the floor, but instead they took off running. Hundreds of them diving under tables, hiding inside cupboards, jumping into sugar bowls, scattering from one large mass of gingerbread and breaking apart into factions.

“Gingerbread men on the loose!”

“Lock the doors!”

“Yayuko, you idiot!”

The gingerbread men screamed in little chipmunk voices as the kitchen elves trapped them under dutch ovens, beat them unconscious with spoons and spatulas, snatched them up by the hand and recollected them. It was a gingerbread man holocaust. No hiding spot was safe. Yuika took off to join the hunt and Peter followed after. Knives were hurled and impaled the cookie people to walls. Frying pans flattened them. The magical ingredient yeti breath freeze dried them into gingerbread mummies. Yuika swore up a storm of profanities like a middle school boy and dove headfirst onto a table and snatched several of them in a lethal hug. Within a few minutes the screams were quelled and the last of the gingerbread men were captured. Perhaps a few of the diminutive cookie people escaped to the safety of a piano or strapped themselves under a mattress, but they had earned their escape.

“How many did you catch?” Yuika asked.

“Uh… three.”

“Good job.” Yuika stuffed a gingerbread man into her mouth and it screamed as she chomped down and chewed him into a crunchy paste.

“Uh…”

“Don’t worry, they can’t feel pain. They’re like lobsters.”

Peter looked down at the gingerbread men in his hand as they struggled to escape his grip. He brought it to his mouth but it stuck out its stubby arms and legs and pushed back against his teeth and lips to avoid its delicious fate. Peter decapitated him so it stopped screaming and struggling, and then he put its scrumptious body into his mouth. It was a sweet, chewy, andhorrific Christmas delicacy.

“No, no, no…” Yuika said. “You must eat them while they’re still alive. It’s the best way. Trust me.”

Yuika held a gingerbread man up to Peter’s face as if she were going to feed it to him. It kicked its little gingerbread legs and fought, but without bones or muscles its struggle was laughably pathetic. Peter reluctantly opened his mouth and Yuika teased the cookie onto his tongue. Peter bit down and hoped he ended its life quickly.

“Kyaaaa! This is so romantic!” she said.

While Peter was crushing and grinding the poor gingerbread man up in his mouth, and Yuika was recovering from her fit of embarrassment, the gears within Peter’s mind began turning.

“So these are magic gingerbread men?”

“Of course.”

“Can you make them bigger?” Peter asked.

“We could but bite sized is best.”

“So you could make a life sized gingerbread man and it could walk?”

Yuika nodded, “Yes.”

“And could you make something other than a gingerbread man? Like a horse or a bird, and it would behave like one? It would be able to gallop or fly?”

Yuika shrugged, not keen on the idea of making gingerbread animals. “Yeah, I suppose.”

“I have a special request,” Peter said. And he asked her to make a gingerbread dragon. As large as she could make it. One that could fly and breathe fire and rip things to shreds. Yuika envisioned the challenges such a cookie would pose. Its size alone would require an oven larger than what the kitchen could accommodate. It would have to be made in pieces and assembled after it was baked. It was an interesting request, but she couldn’t fathom why he would want a cookie so large or dangerous.

“If we’re going to fight the Holy Spirit, we need to use magic.”

Yuika smiled and nodded. “Yes! A magic gingerbread cookie monster! One that can rip out the Holy Spirit’s spine!”

“Yes. I can’t do this alone. Can I trust you to make a kaiju-sized gingerbread dragon— the deadliest thing the North Pole has ever seen?”

“Oh Peter!” Yuika jumped into his arms and applause thundered heavily. Peter looked about him and saw the entire kitchen staff had been eavesdropping and now celebrating. Perhaps the long eared chefs and bakers had thought they would sit on the sidelines while the Christmas apocalypse raged on about the workshop, twiddling their thumbs and looking quite useless. Now that their talents were needed to win the war, their spirits kindled with sweet, delicious blasphemy.

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