Free Bliss by Kathryn Littlewood

screaming, “Hide! Seek! Hide! Seek!” She bounded down the street.
    â€œLeigh!” Chip screamed. “Get back here!”
    Lily grabbed Sage by the hand and ran out the door after Leigh. “We’ll catch her!” she shouted, already halfway down the block.
    Chip called out, “I’ll take care of the customers!” He would have no choice but to leave Rose and Ty alone, for the time being.
    In the kitchen, Rose opened the marble notebook on the counter. She was finally going to have a chance to bake something—not just a usual something, but an extraordinary something! From the Cookery Booke! So why were her hands shaking? She felt like she was about to perform a concert for millions of screaming fans—filled with pride and excitement, but also petrified. What if she made a mistake, and everyone booed? Or worse, what if someone got hurt?
    Sir Jasper Bliss did grate one large green squash while chanting the names of the lonely customers thrice .
    Ty washed a zucchini and pushed it up and down along the rough surface of a cheese grater, and wet ribbons of green dribbled into a pile of messy pulp.
    â€œDon’t forget to chant!” said Rose.
    Ty groaned. “Mr. Bastable and Miss Thistle.”
    â€œLouder!”
    â€œMr. Bastable and Miss Thistle! Mr. Bastable and Miss Thistle!”
    Chip poked his head through the saloon doors. He was breathing rapidly, and his face was red and sweaty. The line outside had doubled. “You kids okay?”
    â€œSure,” Ty stuttered, turning red in the cheeks, “we were just … trying to remember the words to … a rap.”
    Chip scowled. “Just like your mother, always talking nonsense while you’re baking!” He disappeared behind the doors again; Rose and Ty breathed a sigh of relief.
    Sir Jasper did pass through a metal sieve one fist of flour and one fist of sugar .
    Rose furrowed her brow. “A fist. What the heck is a fist?” She made a fist and held it next to her mother’s metal measuring cups, which nested neatly inside one another like Russian dolls. Her fist was about the size of one cup.
    Ty held up his own fist, which was the size of a grapefruit, then held up the one-cup measure, which was tiny in comparison. “Well, mujer ,” he said, “people were smaller back then. Let’s go with one cup.” He dipped the cup measure into the burlap sack of flour and shaved off the excess with his finger, then sifted the flour through a metal sieve that looked like a shallow butterfly net.
    Then he did fold within the batter one egg of the Masked Lovebird, Agapornis personata, which Sir Jasper did acquire from a mystic who had collected them from the primordial forests of Madagascar .
    Rose carefully opened the blue mason jar, making sure that Chip didn’t see what they were doing. She cracked the egg into the center of the batter, and a yolk the color of a red rose plopped into the white batter.
    The yolk began to tremble and shake in the bowl, then disappeared beneath the batter. It reappeared a second later on the other side of the bowl, then dipped down again, then reappeared. It moved faster and faster until it began circling the dough, kneading the batter into a ball in the middle of the bowl.
    And then the yolk exploded in the batter: The mixture crackled and sizzled, sparks of purple and blue shooting up into the air like miniature fireworks and falling back down. Before their eyes, the batter turned a light, delicate shade of pink. Then the noises stopped, the mixture settled, and it was like nothing extraordinary had ever happened.
    Rose shivered. These were no Betty Crocker zucchini muffins.
    She was finally becoming a kitchen magician. Even Ty wore a look of awe.
    Rose and Ty poured the batter into muffin tins and baked them up, guessing when they needed to. Bake at the heat of six flames became 325 degrees, the temperature at which their mother usually set the