On a sunny morning, Lucy the Lamb flitted around her cottage with bubbling excitement. Today was the day of the great Cookie Bake-off, and she could hardly wait to create her masterpiece!
Her kitchen was lit by bright sunbeams bouncing off all the shiny instruments. She lined her ingredients on the table carefully, eyeing the stream of honey, the baskets of nuts and golden raisins, and the big old jar of cocoa powder. “Oh yes!” she smiled, picking up a hefty cookbook with a little picture of a cookie on the cover. “These will be for the judges.”
But as she turned the pages, though they were numbered, they did not seem to lead her anywhere. “Oh, dear!” she sighed, thumping the book shut. “Not a single recipe!”
Just then, there came a gentle knock at the door. Before Lucy could reach it, in bounced Greg the Goat, his nose turning right and left to inspect the room.
“Oh, it’s you, Greg!” she laughed. “Oh dear, oh dear! I am in such trouble. I hoped to make the finest cookies for the bake-off today, but I have no recipe.”
“I can help you, Lucy,” said Greg. “My grandmother had a special recipe—but oh, dearie me! I wonder if I can quite remember it.”
“I wish I had a pencil and some paper!” said Lucy. “But never mind—I’ll remember, too.”
So Greg sat down and stared at the ceiling towards which his bright eyes were pleasantly turned, while Lucy stood before him with her pen ready to write.
And in a moment she was writing, frowning over every word, while Greg tapped his horns gently with an old kitchen spoon as he took each ingredient out of the cupboard. “Now, the first is four cups of flour,” said he. “Then about a couple of cups of any kind of nuts, compounding them finely.”
Greg scratched the wall, thought, and scratched again. “Then we need a teacup of honey—or perhaps it should be molasses. Honey can be used for frosted cakes, I think. So it is likely to be honey.”
Lucy, with a frown, wrote again, and Greg went on.
“Now, let me see. We put in melted butter—or shall we have pure vegetable oil? Then some wonderful compound by the name of cocoa powder. Three cups of each will be ample, I think. Now for the milk, and yes! eggs—three of each.”
He drew a long breath; Lucy went on writing.
“And now a pinch of salt, and half a teacup full of baking powder. And—”
“Well?” said Lucy, looking over her shoulder.
“A whole day in a warm spot.”
Lucy laughed. “What did you say?” she asked.
But Greg only shook his head and repeated, “Oh yes! A whole day in a warm spot,” and that was all she could get from him, though she found afterward that it was only that their dough might rise.
Lucy shook her head. “Never mind. I will make cookies all the same,” and she felt so glad to go to work that she did not really mind Greg’s puzzling recipe.
At last Lucy stood by the oven with a longing face, and though a whole hour remained ere the last tiny cake could be baked in the bright sunshine, her nose began to rejoice in the odorous perfume of delicious cookies.
But just as the door was pushed softly open, and a little chipmunk came into sniff the delectable fragrance of the cookies, there was a loud bang at the kitchen door, and in rushed Greg almost breathless with running.
“Don’t open the window,” he cried, grabbing the chipmunk by its little coat. “He was going to steal our cookies!”
“Oh, I am so glad you came in time!” said Lucy joyfully. “But really, I wonder if my cookies will be as good as I hope.”
Greg said nothing. He went carefully to the table and broke one of the tiny cakes in two. “You taste it, Lucy,” he said. “Is it not quite hot?”
Lucy tasted a tiny tip. “Oh yes. Then I think I will just change the judge.”
Greg laughed, and after she had tasted all the rest of that tiny cookie except a crumb’s weight, she passed it over to Greg, who stood like a statue tasting his own, and at last, when everything was waiting for him, he bit off the other half.
“They are sweet beyond words,” he said. “Really, dearest Lucy, I was never so happy before.”
And then Lucy, equally happy, leaned against him, loving her own delicious cookies and her kind friend Greg who had helped her to make them.