Peek: Cobble Bread

A proper baker keeps rather strange hours.  People love to have fresh baked things for breakfast, but fresh baked things take a considerable amount of time to create.  They need to be mixed, cut, risen, deflated, risen again, portioned, baked, then often topped, too!  All that doesn't just happen in a few minutes!

Freida snorts at her thoughts, recalling a potential competitor, once.  Magic breads just don't taste right, no matter how fancy someone's affinity is!  No, if you want things baked properly, it takes time.  She pauses in her kneading for a moment, wondering if maybe someone with time affinity would be able to give magical baking a proper go.  She shrugs and gets back to work.  The few time mages she's heard of tend towards being more bookish than kitchenish.  Still... maybe Old Staiven can whip up a fancy rising bowl or something for her.

She amuses herself with imagining what she could do with something like that as she works on various doughs and batters.  It will still be several hours before the sun even starts to gleam from beyond the horizon, so there's not much else to occupy her mind.  Even the dungeon across the street doesn't really draw her attention anymore, aside from the occasional bat that decides to hang from her eves.  She can't help but occasionally toss them various pits and other bits that aren't fit to go into her wares.  They're just cute.

Well, they are now, at least.  She remembers when they first started showing up.  She almost reported it to the Dungeoneer's guild when huge swarms of bats would leave the dungeon at night, but they never did anything particularly suspicious.  Now she hardly even notices their constant movements.  She's sure the dungeon is doing something with them, but by all accounts, Thedeim is just weird, not dangerous.

Weird has been great for her business, too.  While her baked treats are hardy as potent as something actually alchemical, they tend to provide their help for longer.  She doesn't pretend to understand why, she just knows that her signature cobble bread will keep someone feeling a bit hardier for an entire day, which is why she has to make so much of it.

Adventurers are always looking for just that right mix of little boosts to give them just the edge they need to do more, and are happy to provide coin for it.  Even better: they'll provide ingredients for her to experiment with to do something new.

The new variety of blueberry muffins might have flopped, but she's not going to let that discourage her.  The new honey the adventurer's have been bringing might not work as well when incorporated into a dough, but there's something she's always wanted to try.

She's heard travelers talk about a pastry involving ground nuts and layers of dough thinner than parchment, all practically drowned in honey.  She has a dough she's been working on for it.  It's no secret that flaky crusts are made by layering butter with dough, which sounds much simpler than trying to roll out a single sheet as thin as the description.

She keeps that in mind as she finishes her rotation, earning her a little time to work on her experiment.  The technique is simple: roll out the dough, smear butter, fold, roll thin, repeat.  It doesn't take long for her mental count of the layers to get beyond what she can easily keep track of, so she calls it good there and cuts the large sheet of dough into several large rectangles, to fit in her loaf pan.  Then she simply layers it in there with various ground nuts and some seasonings, and lets it rise a little as she starts rotating various things into the oven.

As usual, her husband eventually is drawn down the stairs by the scent of fresh bread, the thinner troll smiling as he sees his wife, and the round woman troll smiling at her husband.  They give each other a simple and loving kiss before Hjerl goes to the basement to check on his latest experiment in brewing.  They're hardly able to keep even a single tavern in booze, but their smaller experiments with spirits earns a bit of extra coin when he can sell those along with some of Freida's breads.

He comes back up as the flaky experiment is close to being finished, and he follows his nose to the kitchen, looking eager.

"Trying something new?" he asks as he looks over the cooling racks, mentally calculating how much he'll need to load up.

"Yeah, trying that flaky layer honey disaster I heard about a while ago."

"Well, it certainly smells like it won't be a disaster."

Freida laughs.  "It'll smell great, but you'll end up with sticky fingers after eating it.  I'm also going to try some of that dungeon honey that's supposed to help with focus."

Hjerl licks his lips in anticipation of that.  "Sounds great.  It'll probably be ready after I take the first batch of rolls to the Adventurer's Guild?"

She nods at her husband, and the two look into the large brick oven, each easily able to pick out the new scent among all the other familiar ones.  "I'll try to save you some.  No promises though," she says with a wink, and he laughs as he starts moving the trays.  He trusts her to save him some, but the quicker he gets these rolls delivered, the quicker he can return.  No sense in tempting his wife more than needed, after all.