now, let me preface this by saying that this by no means killua knows how to bake. the boy likes sweets a lot, and he has a little sister who likes sweets just as much, and he wants the sugar. but he’s 16 or 17 and it trying to be a little more spontaneous and do what he wants. when he and alluka are passing through a cute little town, and alluka is dead set on settling down long enough to work on finishing her high school degree for a little while, they see a FOR SALE sign in the window of a suspiciously-recently-closed bakery. killua stares at it for about ten minutes, wishing there were cakes or cupcakes or anything to eat.
“what if I buy it, and then make all the cake we want,” he says.
but then alluka bet him he wouldn’t do it and killua really need to stop betting his sister on things because she always wins. but then he’s got a deed to an empty bakery that smells like sugar and bread and it might have been a mob front at one point because the last owners left really fast.
and he has no idea what to do. he hasn’t baked much of anything ever, and even cooking has been a little too literal of a trial by fire for the last few years. even alluka, whose fault this totally is, is waiting for him to figure out what their first step might be.
so he calls gon. gon laughs (whoa killua that’s huge I thought you only wanted to eat frosting not sell it! –shut UP gon) and puts mito on the phone. mito does her best to not laugh and walks killua through baking cookies. they come out…okay, but nothing like mito’s. killua despairs, but he and alluka eat the entire batch of 124 chocolate chip cookies in a single hour, so it’s not too much despair.
a quick stock of the back room reveals that 1: they have enough for…well, for something at least. lots of flour and sugar and eggs, piled this way; 2: whoever was here last, either thought recipes were for losers or burnt all their books along with something that smells like formaldehyde; and 3: this was absolutely a mob bakery, but it was a bakery as much as a front. killua only finds three bags of poison and half a dozen guns, plus lots of illicit notes buried in couch cushions upstairs and a miserable excuse for a cipher carved into the table. it’s kind of sad, really. kurapika would find this laughable.
the neighbors across the street also try to poison him the next morning while alluka’s buying all the books she can find about baking and high school calculus. it’s kind of nice, really, that they think to try. whatever the last owners had done had really pissed off the locals.
he and alluka try baking. they try remaking the cookies mito had walked them through, and they mostly succeed at making cupcakes, at least until alluka dumps too much powdered sugar into the industrial mixer while trying to make frosting, and they end up with the entire kitchen coated in a thin white powder. kanmuru doesn’t help either, instead whipping up storms of sugar that turn alluka’s black hair as white as killua’s and the kitchen into even more of a disaster than before. also it turns out it’s really easy to make buttercream that’s too sweet even for a pair of zoldycks, no matter what the fancy cookbooks say.
(he calls gon again. it’s rare that they’re in something close to the same timezone these days, only separated by an ocean rather than most of the known world. gon laughs, but good-naturedly, and promises to ask the bakers on whale island how to make taro tapioca. killua reminds him that there isn’t any taro root here, but it’s nice.)
the ladies across the street, tatin and madeleine, turn out to be pretty nice, once they figure out killua really isn’t working for the mob. tatin will occasionally slip something into his morning coffee, but neither she or madeleine try anything with alluka. killua appreciates that, and brings them an attempt at a cake as well as the bags of arsenic he found in the ceiling.
it’s another few weeks of failed attempts that killua finally caves and calls palm. gon’s always been better at coaxing advice out of her, but maybe the best cook he knows would have some good advice. instead, she chews him out for about an hour and a half until his phone dies. he stopped listening after the first ten minutes and half-dozen threats on his capacity to bake at all, because frankly she’s on the other side of the continent, and if she’s not going to give him helpful advice, then it’s not worth paying attention. so he misses it when she promises to show up at his doorstep, and also misses when alluka sends palm their address.
killua’s trying to make bread–it’s just yeast, right, and warm water, and punching something, but he keeps screwing up how much of what, and why do you need sugar???–when palm storms through the front door, carrying more duffel bags than anyone should be able to that clatter with all manner of loud metal objects, and declares the whole place a mess.
killua swears at her, and she throws a knife at his head from somewhere. but then she hugs him, cackling when he bristles with electricity, so it wasn’t really meant to kill him.
it’s good to see her again.
palm all but commandeers the kitchen, going through stock and reorganizing the shelves, adding all the various objects she’d brought with her. some killua recognizes, mostly different types of cakepans he’d seen in alluka’s books, but then palm starts talking about the differences between handmixing and stand mixers and industrial mixers and killua has learned how to kill people in more ways than he can count, can name most of the political leaders in the world and all the weaknesses in their security circa five years ago, and he has no idea what palm’s talking about.
she sighs and shows him how to chop things properly with knives or sharp nails. it’s surprisingly useful.
(gon is predictably delighted, and demands killua put palm on the phone. they end up talking about some chicken dish gon’s trying to learn, and killua extracts a promise from one of them to feed him whatever this is at some point.)
it takes palm almost no time to teach alluka how to make a decent genoise, in between cram sessions and signing up for tests. killua has more trouble. it’s not so much that he doesn’t have the attention span, it’s that he keeps cracking the oven to see when anything’s done, or he overthinks, or he and alluka eat all of the cookie batter before it can go into the oven. he does turn out to have an eye–a taste?–for getting buttercream and king’s icing right, balancing different flavors and parts sugar to butter, and even color mixing, when he’s not trying to eat his body weight in pastries. palm loudly smacks away both zoldyck teenagers, who have very little pain tolerance and even less when it comes to melting chocolate.
killua does eventually get the sponge right before they run out of the stores of stuff the mob bakers had left behind. alluka cheers so loud that not only do tatin and madeleine come over, but so does flahn from the bookstore and canele from the restaurant with the checkered tables and the really good spaghetti.
when killua asks palm if she wants to take over baking for the bakery, so they can actually sell things and not just waste money and time. she laughs–the loud, cackling, evil-sounding thing that means she’s delighted. of course she says yes. but of course she also makes sure that killua will keep helping.
(he and palm and alluka send gon and mito a care package full of cookies and brownies that killua made, so they aren’t as well-made or pretty as palm’s. but gon sends back a container full of sweets made of coconut and taro, and killua’s never had anything quite as good either.)
anyways kurapika stops by later with melody and tatin and madeleine bring out machetes and guns so fast that killua has to use kanmuru to keep them from murdering his friends, or from his friends murdering his neighbors. they all have a lovely meal afterwards, and tatin only tries to put a little hemlock in the coffee.
