Chapter 113: Teaching You What You Like (Thanks to Guo Qiuqiu for the Alliance Leader tip)

Happy times are always short-lived, and soon it was time for Chen Yingjun and the fruit-shaped pastry to say goodbye.

Over the next few days, Zheng Siyuan made the remaining types of fruit-shaped pastries for Chen Yingjun to taste. Chen Yingjun ate them with great delight, eventually settling on the apple, jujube, and peach pastries.

Two jujubes were placed inside, symbolizing "good things come in pairs," to bring good luck to the high-end gift box.

Chen Yingjun gnawed on a peach-shaped pastry, looking at its pink exterior, the white-and-yellow interior, and the pit at the very center; tears almost fell from his eyes.

Such delicious things, he wouldn't be able to eat them much in the future.

Chen Yingjun had already signed the contract with Zheng Siyuan and paid the full amount at once, completing the feat of being rated the best "Client Papa" of the year.

However, the property management company's promotional campaign needed time, the custom gift boxes needed time, and at the same time, Zheng Siyuan needed a rest.

Of course, rest was an excuse; the main thing was that Zheng Siyuan himself didn't really love making fruit-shaped pastries. Usually, when teaching Qin Huai, he only needed to make a few, but once he took an order, there was a fixed daily output, which would compress the time he had to make his beloved shortbread, victory cakes, fresh meat mooncakes, and Qiaoguo.

Zheng Siyuan didn't feel Chen Zong's sadness at all.

"Chen Zong, since the specific contents of the gift box have been finalized, once the delivery date is set, you just need to send someone over to pick them up every day," Zheng Siyuan said. "Do you have any other questions?"

"Can I buy 20 jin of shortbread to take back today?" Chen Yingjun asked sadly.

Zheng Siyuan:...?

Facing Zheng Siyuan's questioning gaze, Chen Yingjun immediately changed his tune: "10 jin is fine too."

"Ah no, 5 jin."

"3 jin, Master Xiao Zheng, you have to spare me 3 jin. My family has a full 3 people + 2 cats!"

Zheng Siyuan said slowly: "Even if you weren't collaborating with us, as a customer, it's your freedom to buy as much as you want, but today..."

"I didn't make any shortbread."

"The pastries made this morning have all been sold out. Now, there are only the sponge cakes made by Master Chen in the shop."

Chen An, who had long since finished work and was at home watching TV, sneezed and rubbed his nose.

Chen Yingjun felt as if the sky had collapsed.

In the end, Chen Yingjun sadly took a packed box of fruit-shaped pastries and two jin of sponge cakes home.

After Chen Yingjun left, Zheng Siyuan didn't go back directly, but sat in the kitchen chatting with Qin Huai.

Qin Huai was still molding animal-shaped red bean buns.

"Your finger technique is wrong," Zheng Siyuan reminded him. "Your fingers shouldn't be afraid to use force; press when you need to press, and lift when you need to lift. When you are shaping a pastry, you should have a rough composition in your mind. Under normal circumstances, you should mold it in your mind once before you start doing it."

Zheng Siyuan looked at the completely shapeless dough in Qin Huai's hands and sighed: "I find you really strange."

"Ah?" Qin Huai looked up blankly. Struggling with the dough while chatting with Zheng Siyuan, Qin Huai couldn't really focus.

"At the very beginning, when you made the apple-shaped pastry, I felt you were extremely talented in finger technique, reaching a level of self-taught mastery that was simply unheard of."

"But later, when you made the grapes, jujubes, peaches, and longans, I felt your talent was mediocre, like a standard beginner."

"But your pears were actually quite good."

"Now..." Zheng Siyuan looked complexly at the dough in Qin Huai's hands, which was hard to describe and he didn't know what he was struggling with. "What are you molding?"

"Doraemon," Qin Huai said. "This is for Did Luo Luo. Didn't you just say to go through it in your mind first? I don't have any specific animal images in my mind, only Doraemon, Snoopy, Hello Kitty, Garfield, and Black Cat Detective. I think the blue fatty is easier to mold, so I went through it in my mind and started molding it now."

Zheng Siyuan:...

Is there a possibility that what he meant by "going through it in your mind" was basic, normal animals?

"You are more like a beginner now than at any other time," Zheng Siyuan lamented. "You are really strange."

"You can mold a perfect apple-shaped pastry, but you can't mold a basic little rabbit. The feeling you give me now isn't just simple uneven development; it's more like you're good at fill-in-the-blanks but bad at listening comprehension."

One could tell that Zheng Siyuan detested fill-in-the-blanks.

"I don't know what's going on either," Qin Huai continued trying to mold the blue fatty. "Before I met you all through Master Wang, the person I knew who made the best pastries was Master Qin, who ran a chestnut shortbread shop at the back door of our residential area."

Seeing Zheng Siyuan's blank expression, Qin Huai explained: "Qin is a common surname where I live. In elementary school, out of 57 people in our class, 17 were surnamed Qin, more than those surnamed Wang." "That Master Qin's chestnut cakes and mung bean cakes were especially delicious. He even taught me how to make mung bean cakes. But after he taught me, he found that the mung bean cakes I made were better than his, so he stopped teaching me chestnut cakes."

Zheng Siyuan:...

"I had never learned so-called techniques before, nor had I systematically learned the ratio of ingredients, and I didn't even know much about ingredients. My mom usually bought the same old things; whatever was cost-effective at the market, that's what we ate."

"Maybe you think it's strange that I'm very skilled one moment and mold it like this the next, but for me, I've been making pastries like this since I was a child."

"Making Four-Joy Dumplings was very difficult. Following the recipes online and in the pastry encyclopedia, no matter how I did it, it wasn't right. No one had taught me the compatibility and pairing of ingredients. I remember that when I was testing the recipe, it was simply buying whatever was at the market, using the exhaustive method, testing one by one."

"Did Luo Luo ate two months of terrible Four-Joy Dumplings, and all her New Year's money was spent before we finally got it right."

"But when making some pastries, it was very simple. Like Donkey Rolls, Pea Flour Cakes, Crab Powder Crisps, and Crab Shell Yellows, they were actually all looked up in cookbooks like the Four-Joy Dumplings. There weren't even video tutorials because my family didn't have a computer at that time."

"But these pastries were made very smoothly, and I learned them after trying a few times."

"And kneading dough, although my dough kneading theory was taught by President Qin, President Qin couldn't knead it well himself. No one had taught me how to knead dough for steamed pastries, or how to knead dough for baked pastries, but I just knew how."

"So sometimes, although Master Zheng's words are very abstract, always saying 'you know this feeling, right?' or 'do you understand that feeling?', I do indeed know what feeling Master Zheng is talking about, because I have always relied on feeling to make pastries."

"So if you ask me why I can only make apple-shaped pastries well, I can only say that I have a very good feeling when making them."

Qin Huai finished speaking.

Zheng Siyuan fell into deep thought.

During the process of Qin Huai speaking, he had already finished his struggle with the dough and molded the prototype of a big-headed blue fatty.

Zheng Siyuan watched Qin Huai take a tool to dot the eyes and draw whiskers for the blue fatty.

"I remember you make hedgehog buns very well," Zheng Siyuan said. "How did you learn that?"

"That was also from looking at the pastry encyclopedia," Qin Huai said, re-dotting the eyes because he hadn't done them well. "My hedgehog buns didn't look good at first either; it was completely practiced. When Did Luo Luo was little, she especially loved eating hedgehog buns."

Zheng Siyuan fell into deep thought.

Qin Huai took a small pot and put the blue fatty in to steam separately.

After a while, the blue fatty was out of the pot, and Qin Huai did the final touches.

Very ugly.

Ugly-cute.

But the taste shouldn't be bad. Qin Huai kneaded the dough, Qin Huai made the filling; normal consumption would definitely be no problem.

"Tsk tsk tsk." Qin Huai couldn't help but click his tongue at his own craftsmanship. "It's really too ugly. Did Luo Luo still has an hour before school ends; let me make her a meat-filled one."

"I understand," Zheng Siyuan said.

"Ah?" Qin Huai was confused again.

Why has Zheng Siyuan become so jumpy lately?

"I know how to teach you finger technique now: teach you what you like," Zheng Siyuan said.

"What I like? What do I like?" Qin Huai was still a bit confused.

He didn't understand finger technique very well. These two days, he was either molding apple-shaped pastries or animal-shaped red bean buns. One was especially difficult, one was especially simple, and he hadn't tried anything of medium intensity, like Lotus Crisps, Thousand-Layer Crisps, or Golden Silk Rolls.

"You like what Did Luo Luo likes," Zheng Siyuan said decisively. "If you are sleepy, go back to sleep first. I'll wait here for Did Luo Luo to finish school and ask her what kind of good-looking pastries she likes to eat."

"Whatever she wants to eat, I will teach you."

Qin Huai:?

For some reason, Qin Huai felt he wasn't far from becoming the "Second Brother."

(End of chapter) ===== CHAPTER 114 =====