"I hope you also like snickerdoodles," she says to Darren.

"They're fine cookies," he says. "Besides, I'm pretty sure that baking cookies is for Savannah's sake, more than ours."

"I intend to enjoy them too!"

"Me too. She doesn't bake cookies very often."

"I do remember you saying you're the primary cook around here."

"Yup! I don't often bake, either, though. Because I tend to get obsessive with making things perfect and I fight with frosting. Usually, the frosting wins."

"Cookies don't usually have frosting."

"Yes, but then I try to get them into interesting shapes and they turn into blob monsters instead."

"You do this with drop cookies?" snorts Bella.

"I have absolutely no idea what that means."

"Drop cookies are the kinds where you spoon little blobs of dough onto a baking sheet and then they spread out into disks. Like oatmeal or chocolate chip ones."

"Oh. Then yes. It never works right."

"I wouldn't expect it to. I guess you could drop the dough into metal cookie cutters, and bake them therein, but I'd expect it to get too crispy around the edges."

"Yeah. So I just get annoyed and pout rather than trying to find solutions. My brainpower needs to be channeled to magic and such."

"Well, I'd suggest other baked goods, but I have every intention of benefitting from your expertise on magic and I know how to bake all by myself."

"Yup! I'll just let it be a rare thing or leave it to other people. While I try to gain experience for the next level of wizard."

"Maybe one day you will be able to magically conjure snickerdoodles. Is making stuff out of nothing a thing spells can do at all?"

"I don't think it is, but if I turn out to be wrong I will so not be complaining."

"But none of the runes you know have it in their repertoire?"

"None. But I don't know all runes ever, so I will not rule out the possibility entirely."

There is Darren! He is honorary cookie-bearer. "Hello! Savannah baked and the results are delicious. Do you want cookies now, or at lunch?"

"I think I can wait till lunch, Charlie did this thing at breakfast he sometimes does where he decides the occasion calls for nice food, decides this is the time to learn to make it, and then I have to rescue everything. There was a lot to rescue."