Top Secret and Sometimes Illegal

It was Maggie’s turn to make dessert for book club, and she was stumped on what to make. She wasn’t really a baker and Cynthia could always sniff out store-bought treats, so she knew she was going to have to step up her game a little. The last thing she needed was the ladies whispering about her non-existent baking skills at church this Sunday. She scanned through all her cookbooks and settled on a simple dessert that was loaded with chocolate.

              “There,” she thought, “No one can resist chocolate.” The ladies of book club were known to enjoy the sweeter things in life, and chocolate was no exception. This was sure to be a win across the board.

              The smell of chocolate filled her house, and both her husband and teenage son Riley came down to check out what she was making. Both knew she was not a baker, so to see her attempting any kind of dessert was something they had to watch. She gave them the bowl and spoon to lick clean while she cleaned up the counters and she had to laugh at them. It really was like having small children in the house again sometimes.

              “Maggie, this is delicious!” her husband Rob said, scraping his fingers in the bowl to get as much of the batter as he possibly could.

              She looked over at him and saw that he had chocolate on his nose, so she leaned over and wiped it off with a dish towel and gave him a quick kiss.

              “Ewww guys, I’m right here,” Riley said in disgust. He dropped the spoon in the sink and went back up to his room.

              They both giggled and gave each other another kiss. The oven timer beeped, and Maggie took her masterpiece out of the oven. It certainly looked good. She couldn’t wait to see the look on Cynthia’s face when she saw this.

              Before she left, she whipped up a quick dinner of tater tot hotdish and stuck it in the fridge with strict instructions on how to bake it and for how long. Rob was absent-minded, and if not given exact marching orders, could mess making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich up sometimes. If she wanted Rob and Riley to eat, steps needed to be taken, no matter how annoying it could be.

              She grabbed her dessert, yelled good-bye, and headed out the door. On the drive over, her friend Peggy called to make sure she wasn’t going to swing by the grocery store to grab her dessert. Peggy knew firsthand how awful Cynthia could be; Peggy had been the one who dared to bring store-bought chocolate chip cookies to book club once and she had yet to live it down. Maggie assured her that she did her own baking and that no one was going to be disappointed this time.

              “All right ladies, let’s get into discussing the first few chapters we needed to read for this week.”

              Cynthia looked out at all of them over the top of her glasses, waiting for someone to start talking. Maggie knew if someone did not start talking soon, Cynthia would start picking people at random like a third-grade teacher asking their students to read out loud, so she volunteered to discuss her thoughts.

              Book club really wasn’t meant to be so serious. Maggie and a few of her friends had wanted to have an excuse to read good books, drink wine, and eat snacks while all getting some time away from their husbands and kids. If they talked about the book, it was extraordinarily little and never about plot points or the hidden messages the author was trying to portray. It was just for fun.

              Now, it felt like they all had homework every week, but at least there was still plenty of wine and good snacks to go around. Someone always made a couple appetizers, one person made a main meal, and one person took care of dessert. The hostess supplied the wine. Everyone else came and had a good time.

              They had made their way through the appetizers Karen brought and were just now getting started on the chili Peggy made for dinner. They sat around the table, crushing Saltines over their steaming bowls of chili and catching up with each other now that the serious book discussion was done. Maggie went into the kitchen and turned the oven on warm and placed her dessert in there to warm up slightly. She planned to serve it warm with ice cream, which was store-bought, but Cynthia would just have to get over that part.

              She let the dessert warm for about five minutes and then started cutting it and placing it into bowls with a scoop of vanilla bean ice cream. Peggy helped her carry bowls out to the rest of the ladies who were waiting at the table, and they all sat down to dig into dessert.

              The entire table was speechless. Everyone knew that Maggie was not a baker by any stretch of the imagination, so for her to pull off a dessert so good Cynthia couldn’t make a snide comment about it was truly a shock. It was so good that no one even realized that they hadn’t started drinking the wine yet. The compliments came rolling in and didn’t stop; Maggie was so proud of herself, she felt she could burst.

              As they were all cleaning up after dinner, she realized she was starting to feel funny. It wasn’t necessarily a bad feeling, but she could not figure out why she felt almost drunk when she had only one glass of wine with dessert. Peggy, who was over at the sink doing dishes, started to giggle uncontrollably, so Maggie asked her what was so funny, and Peggy pointed to two big bubbles in the sink that she said reminded her of breasts, and they both started howling with laughter.

              Tears streaming down their faces, they both finished up the dishes and went out to the living room to join the other women, most of whom had flushed cheeks and dancing eyes. Everyone seemed to be in such a good mood, even Cynthia, which was practically unheard of. Maggie chalked it up to good wine and enjoyed the rest of her evening.

              Once she got home, she saw that Rob was sitting at the kitchen table waiting for her, plastic container in hand. When she walked through the door, he started chuckling and asked her if the plastic container looked familiar. Maggie laughed at him and told him that it didn’t look familiar to her other than the fact that it was a butter container. Rob was now practically shaking with laughter now.

              “Honey, remember how I told you I had a friend make me some homemade butter?” he asked her.

              She looked at him and tried to remember having this conversation, but all she could think of were those bubbles in the sink and she got the giggles again.

              Rob shook his head, still laughing. “Seriously Maggie, do you remember that? I told you it was probably the most expensive butter on the planet, and you scolded me for how much I spent on it.”

              Then it hit her. Oh no. She was absolutely horrified. How did she not notice what butter she was using? It was clearly labelled. This was awful! They would never let her bake for book club again! She would be lucky to be able to show her face at church on Sunday.

              Then; she began to giggle, which then turned into uncontrollable laughter. Rob was laughing so hard tears were streaming down his cheeks.

              Turns out, pot butter is the secret ingredient for the best brownies ever. Who knew?