genessia | THE GENESSIA WORLD COOKING CHAMPIONSHIP

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THE GENESSIA WORLD COOKING CHAMPIONSHIP

WHO: Whitley Schnee, all of the contestants and judges who signed up, and anyone who wishes to spectate!
WHAT: The moment of truth has arrived! Who's makes the best entree? The best dessert? How many judges will go home with food poisoning unrelated to Chara totally not using actual buttercups in their pie? Let's find out!
WHEN: November 20th, Early evening
WHERE: Genessia City

===

[ Once all contestants and judges are at the venue, and enough time has passed for the audience to settle into place, Whitley takes center stage with a broad smile and a polite bow. ]

Good evening, culinary enthusiasts, and welcome to the Genessia World Cooking Championship! We have an impressive lineup of contestants ready to show us what they're capable of - but first, allow me to introduce our panel of judges.

[ He lifts one hand to gesture to a table at one end of the room, where the five judges are seated, with an extra seat remaining for Whitley himself. As he introduces each he allows a moment for them to stand and wave to the crowd, should they so desire: ]

Shinjiro Aragaki, Alice Nakiri, Gwen Stacy, Aeslyn Blackrose, and Demyx - as well as myself, of course! A truly diverse array of palettes if ever there was one, but we'll see which entries are superb enough to wow us all. We'll begin first with the entrees, then allow a short intermission before moving onto the desserts.

[ He claps his hands together in front of himself, nodding sharpy. ]

I don't think there's any need to say more, and truth be told I'm famished, so without further ado - will all chefs making entrees please find your stations!

(( OOC: First and foremost, thank you everyone who signed up! As you may have noticed we had exactly five people sign up to be judges, so EVERYONE WHO SIGNED UP TO BE A JUDGE IS IN! As for how the contest will work now, there will be headers below for each entry with the chef's name, their dish, and their meta score from the random number generator plus their experience bonus. Chefs may comment in those threads to describe their process and what may have gone right or wrong, while judges are free to react as if they are tasting the dish!

That should about cover things, but if there are any questions feel free to shoot me a PM!

p.s. yes these are seriously the numbers I rolled so make of that what you will ))

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DISH BEING ENTERED: The Cake Town Special - Layers of yellow cake alternating with crisp puff pastry, sandwiching sweet bean paste and sliced bananas, with a rich chocolate ganache drizzle over the whole thing.

SCORE: 54

DISH BEING ENTERED: Butterscotch Cinnamon Pie

SCORE: 18

DISH BEING ENTERED: Curry

SCORE: 65

DISH BEING ENTERED: Sole meunière

SCORE: 33

DISH BEING ENTERED: Ultimate Chicken Nuggets - Jaune will be making chicken nuggets drizzled in barbecue sauce, some buffalo style nuggets, and attempt (and fail) to fry chicken nuggets in chocolate and caramel.

SCORE: 61

DISH BEING ENTERED: Nora Allen's Famous Chicken Pot Pie.

SCORE: 78

DISH BEING ENTERED: Sojiro Sakura's Famous Curry

SCORE: 44

DISH BEING ENTERED: Apple pie

SCORE: 116

DISH BEING ENTERED: Old World Chocolate-filled Croissants

SCORE: 83

DISH BEING ENTERED: Spaghetti bolognese

SCORE: 34

DISH BEING ENTERED: Dacquoise (a type of cake)

SCORE: 97

[ There's a reception after the contest is concluded, with all manner of refreshments and tables to sit at and the like. Talk to your fellow chefs! Talk to your fellow judges! Throttle the judge for scoring your dish so low because how dare they! ]

[Say what you will about Minako's low skill level in cooking. You'd be perfectly justified to be scathing, or even insulting. But as soon as the timer starts, her natural athleticism gives her a big boost of energy as she darts from place to place, frantically dicing onions, cubing the chicken, sizzling oil and curry powder in a pan before throwing in the ingredients.]

[A big tower of flame goes straight up, nearly singing her face. But once it dies back down, bam! Flash-cooked chicken! Well...it's not burned, so she'll take it. Into the pot it goes, with the potatoes, carrots, and...hey, do water chestnuts belong in curry? THEY DO NOW.]

[She scrapes in some more spices, seasoning it liberally with cumin, salt, and pepper...basically the things that she thinks smell good. And since there was garlic available, she's adding some of that too.]

[But the rice is coming out of a rice cooker because she's basic like that and she's not taking any chances.]

[The results are...questionable. She happily serves up a big platter that's bubbling with a steady 'plurp blop plurp' even though it's...not hot. In fact, parts of it are a little icy in the middle. Why? Because she was worried she might burn Whitley's tongue if she just served it straight from the pot so she added ice cubes to make it a better temperature. Apparently, that dilutes some of the stronger spices to make it palatable, even pleasant.]

[But it's anyone's guess as to how it's bubbling like that if it isn't that hot. What the hell, Minako.]

[She stands with her eyes shining and way too big, eagerly clasping her hands together. It's good, right? She worked really hard on this!]

Edited 2017-11-20 22:06 (UTC)

Sakuya seemed very confident in her dish. She cooked with astounding efficiency, moving quickly from station to station, never leaving anything alone for too long. Even without her powers she had the cake in the oven with quite a bit of speed, spending the remainder of the time on prepping and decorating.

Each slice of her cake was placed on a dish decorated with a ribbon of bitter mocha chocolate. The cake itself was decorated with chocolate shavings and hazelnut pieces. It was a very light confection and made of several layers with no small amount of hazelnuts mixed in. It was all held together with a cream based frosting that was nearly too sweet.

Each slice was presented with an accompanying cup of coffee brewed just right and paired with the cake. It would compliment the rich flavors and offset the sweetness into something more tolerable and ensure the flavors were experienced as they were meant to be.

Edited (Fixed a huge error.) 2017-11-21 01:54 (UTC)

[On today's episode of Sailor Moon, Mina really gave it her all. Learning a new skill takes time, and patience, and a lot of hard work. No one's born knowing how to cook, or dance, or even play sports. Don't get discouraged if you make a mistake! That's just part of how you learn. Keep it up. With plenty of practice and a little determination, you can be a superstar in no time! Sailor Moon says!]

Sakuya could be found mingling with the various there. At least, a little bit. At first.

Once the initial fanfare was over she could be found sitting down a ways away staring intently at a little red booklet and biting the back of a pen. She's hard to sneak up on but with how focused she was it might be possible. She was going over the recipe she used over and over again.

Clearly she was being much too hard on herself despite getting second place. But something like that was to be expected from someone as obsessed with perfection as she was.

Guess who happened to watch the whole thing, every up and down and all of it. With Sakuya lost in thought like that, it was simple for a vampire to sneak up on her.

"Sakuya. I expected better."

[ Alice doesn't want to even taste it. She can see some of the things wrong with it already and is making a face. But she does it, a very small bite, then puts her spoon down and pushes it away on the judging table. It's worse than she thought... ]

The most important factor in creating a curry is a thorough understanding of spices and the creativity to bring it beyond a basic recipe.

[ Where did Alice get a chalk board? Where did she get the white coat? These are the questions the public wants to know, but she's not going to answer. She slaps the end of a pointer stick on the board after she draws basically molecular compounds on the board, with arrows pointing to the words "Curry Powder" ]

The first thing that you can taste in this curry is curry powder, a preprepared mixture of subpar spices with little to no fresh ingredients. In professional cooking, the important thing to recognize is that when you use ingredients like curry powder, the spices have been cracked open and usually improperly stored. By being ground up so early, the chemical compounds within the spices begin to decompose in storage rather than maintaining their full chemical composition and illuminating the curry. The decomposed molecules sometimes form alternate bonds which can alter the taste of both the curry powder mixture and the curry itself. The taste suffers and so does the ever-important appetite-building scent that should have overwhelmed the rest of the chefs' dishes was nowhere to be found, instead melding in like a non-descript blob of subpar soup.

[ Alice stands up, pointing at the bird in the dish dramatically. Again with the pointer. ]

The second mistake is in the chicken! You didn't fully cook and seal-in the flavor of the chicken. The flames that burst forth earlier cooked the outside of the chicken, but not the inside, and managed to create an uneven caramelization. This caramelization is important for both creating a "seal" that holds in the flavors of the chicken. This is why sometimes people end up with very bland-tasting chicken in practice, but it also is what created these strange bubbles in the curry. While the chicken continued to cook inside of the curry, it leeched most of the water and fat out into the curry base. These bubbles that are here are actually still-melted but insoluble fats, creating an immiscible curry. Because of the extra water content in your curry from the added ice and unfortunately high-liquid vegetables like water chestnuts, your curry is trying to escape itself.

"Thermal sense curry" is my specialty, you really shouldn't try to challenge someone with something like this. [ She pouts. What the hell is that ice cube nonsense... this whole thing is bad.. her points are definitely coming from the other judges, Alice isn't providing many at all. ] Lastly: Caramelize your onions first. You should never toss raw onions into a dish even if that dish is going to cook them for you, you lose out on the potential to enhance your flavor. That's basic. Don't enter a competition until you've at least practiced basic cooking tenants.

Sakuya jumped very slightly, looking up and blinking at the vampire. "... I know, Lady Remilia." She bit her lip and looked down at the book, biting the pen again.

"... I am honestly not sure what I did wrong..." Her heel clicked several times on the tiled floor, scanning the recipe up and down again. "Maybe I simply chose the wrong thing to make."

Remi be less harsh on her. She only lost by a very very small margin.

[Honestly, Gwen didn't know the first thing about judging the finer details about cooked food. She didn't really care either. She was here to eat food and that's what she was going to do.

This honestly looks like something she had made at some point when she was still in high school and her dad was working late. It's far from the best thing she's probably going to eat today, but it might not be the worst either.]

10 outta 10!

[Someone had to give her a good score.]

[ ... It certainly didn't look like much, that was for certain.

However, it didn't smell bad.

Shinjiro felt dubious, but. He signed up for this. Only slightly coerced, even, so he mostly knew what was getting into. And dodgy curry wasn't so bad, right?

He poked at it with a fork, got some veggies and chicken in the same portion, and took a bite.

Surprised, he said before he stopped himself - ]

... This ain't bad.

[ And then. Well. Serious judge time. He tried a little bit of the center - ew - and the outsides - better. Frowned a little. Gathered his thoughts. ]

You're lucky the chicken got cooked 'nough, considerin that fire you nearly started. Raw chicken belongs in the trash, not the table. But it's cooked through, only some parts are burned. What ain't burned, ain't bad.

The veggies are better. Somehow the potatoes are done right. That can be kinda hard to time, so, I think you might've got lucky. Or you practiced a lot. Good job, either way.

Rice ain't nothin fancy. So, can't complain it's bad, but can't really give you props for it neither.

And the curry sauce.

It's familiar. Nothin fancy. Certainly had better, but certainly had worse, too. This time it's obvious. You probably made this a buncha times, concentrated on this part. Sure, it ain't high-brow shit. Curry powder is cheap, kinda simple, nothin you're gonna get a job for as a chef.

But it tastes like somethin from home, and you captured that flavor real well. It tastes like what you think when you want comfortin curry.

So. Good job, Minako.

[ Glares. ]

Never put ice in this again.

[Oh they thought they were ready for this, heck they even practiced making the pie just so they wouldn't mess it up. But practice doesn't make perfect here, as well...

Chara tried to make too many parts of the recipe at once, just so then it would all be easier to finish it up. Of course this haste means that they messed up the butterscotch, it turned out grainy, the crust got burned and they put too much cinnamon in it.

So once it comes time to have the food judged? Chara is doing their darnest to not look upset about the whole thing.]

[Arelen was actually quite pleased with the equipment and ingredients that were provided for the contestants. Highest quality it seemed, and considering the attitude of the person running the contest seemed more than familiar (as it usually was with those born into wealth), she wasn't very surprised by this at all.

She took her time with her dish, even if it WAS the easiest for her to make. Only because it wasn't just a quick batch for herself at home- it was a competition.

For money.

Although, once she was invested in her mixing and measuring by eye, there was a smile on her face. She may have even been humming to herself as she eyed the butter, water, milk and other such ingredients.

She did everything in layers, more butter between each layer to add to the natural buttery taste of croissants, utilizing the equipment to refrigerate quickly... although it wasn't the way she would have liked. If she really wanted to make these completely perfect, she would have done it in steps by the day.

Time limits were a thing however, so she had to work with what she had.

As the croissants were placed in the oven, she began making the chocolate sauce from baking chocolate pieces, and more sugar and butter. When it was the perfect consistency, she let it cool just enough to put into a piping bag, take the croissants out, and let them cool.

They weren't as fluffy and airy as she'd have liked, and frowned for most of the finishing parts.

Arelen then filled each one with chocolate and drizzled the remainder on top of them.

At least they LOOKED good.

She was sure they would taste good, but she could have done better if she just had the time to work with the dough more. The fluffier, the better.

Hopefully she would win SOMETHING.

She put a smile back on as she presented them to the judges.]

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Page 1 of 4

THE GENESSIA WORLD COOKING CHAMPIONSHIP

ENTREES

DESSERTS

ORIHIME INOUE

CHARA

MINAKO AINO

MOBIUS

JAUNE ARC

BARRY ALLEN

AKIRA KURUSU

RAPUNZEL

ARELEN

DAVID FORD

SAKUYA IZAYOI

POST-COMPETITION MINGLING

Re: MINAKO AINO

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A HARSH JUDGMENT!!!!

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small child cries over pie

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