MASTERKEY

“What’s that in your hand?” Ginika asked with a frown on her face.

Chinedu sneered as he lifted the transparent sachet higher so all the members of the group could see it. “It is the secret ingredient that will solve all of our problems…” he announced. 

Ginika didn’t know what the content of the sachet was, but she was open to receiving a miracle.

***

The Alozie Community Baking Contest held at the end of each year. It was known far and wide for the marvels the many bakers within the community conjured for its outlandish contests. People visited from far and wide for different reasons; some visited to marvel at the wonderful creations of the baking community, some visited to spend the holidays with their loved ones, while others visited in search of ideas they could take back home.

Alozie Community was the foremost community of bakers in the country. All the major bakeries were located within its shores. A majority of the bakers there inherited the profession from their forebears along with the facilities they used. The community had been known for centuries for the fantastic baked goods that its people produced. The Baking Contest was a means by which the community put the immense talents of its people on full display for all to see.

The contest was more of a festival celebrating baked goods than just a contest. It was a week-long event. On each day, different classes of bakeries put their creations on full display for people to admire and buy, and for judges to taste and choose a winner for the contest of the day. 

While each day brought with it different surprises, the most anticipated contest of the bunch was the one that held on the final day. The grand finale. On that day, the elite bakeries in the community faced off in the hopes of clinching the prize for the Biggest Cookie Ever. The requirement for winning the contest wasn’t just to exceed ones competitors for the current year, the winning bakery also had to defeat the record set for the previous year, which was actually the hardest part, because they had to stretch the limits of technology to produce a cookie slightly or significantly bigger than the winning cookie from the year before.

The contest had been held for many decades, and as the years passed, it gradually morphed from a “baking contest” to a technology contest. Mixing the batter was easy, choosing flavors was easy, determining what texture would best match with the flavor and other ingredients was also easy. The real challenge was determining how to mix it all together, proof it, and then bake the tons of batter into one solid cookie. That was the real challenge.

Bakeries in the area had invested millions into specialized bakeries designed specifically for the Biggest Cookie Ever contest. This was the reason why it was the highlight of the festival, and also why it was the reserve of elite bakeries. The smaller bakeries just couldn’t afford the human and financial resources required to pull of such a great feat. 

The top two contenders were Izuchukwu Bakes and Omekannaya Bakery. Both bakeries had struggled for the top position for decades, and they were both seen as the main contenders for the prize. There were three other elite bakeries that also participated, but everyone knew they were merely competing for the spots available for runner-ups. They had long stopped bothering with trying to outcompete the two major bakeries. It would amount to suicide for their businesses.

The reason why the top two competed so doggedly for the top spot was because of the benefits that came with a win. The winner of the contest got to do business tax-free for the following year, and all charges on their imports of ingredients and exports of finished products were also halved. Those benefits, combined, resulted in gains that far exceeded everything the bakeries spent on the human and technological resources required to pull off a win.

Unfortunately for Omekannaya Bakery, no matter how hard they tried, their efforts always ended in vain. They had only been able to clinch the top spot once in the twenty years they’d been participating in the contest. They spent the other nineteen years behind Izuchukwu Bakes in a distant second position, and while second position came with its own financial benefits, they were nothing when compared to coming first. 

It wasn’t that Omekannaya hadn’t made the investments they needed to make, or that they had a weaker team. Their investments were at par with Izuchukwu’s, and so was their team. They had even poached many of their team members from Izuchukwu over the years, but Izuchukwu was always a step ahead of them. Whenever Omekannaya thought they had gotten a leg up on Izuchukwu, Izuchukwu would come out from nowhere and clinch the win with a very slim number of points. It was this slim number of points that exacerbated the pain of the loss to much greater heights each year.

***

Omekannaya Bakery, led by Ginika, the heiress to the late owner of the facility, decided to switch gears. Year-in, year-out, the story from the judges was always the same. They always told the Omekannaya Team that while their efforts were appreciated, and while they recognized that the Izuchukwu Team’s cookies were only slightly bigger than theirs, what did it for them was the taste of the cookies produced by Izuchukwu Bakes. There was just something about the ingredient mix that made their cookies seem much larger than life. 

The fact of the matter was that the bakeries had already reached the limits of how much bigger they could make their cookies without putting their teams and their company finances in grave danger. The contest had therefore morphed from a purely size-based contest to encompass taste, texture, smell, and other metrics. The owners of Izuchukwu had a secret recipe which worked for them every year, and if Omekannaya was to beat them and take the top prize, they would either have to discover that recipe, or create a recipe that would weaken the effect Izuchukwu Bakes’ recipe had on the judges. 

It was based on that knowledge that Ginika gave her thirty team members the task of discovering an ingredient, or ingredients, which would make the Izuchukwu Bakes recipe taste like sand in the mouths of the judges.

The team had worked on it for a whole year but they had come up with nothing. All sorts of ingredients had been tested but nothing seemed to work, and with the next contest looming, Ginika was beginning to fear that the end of the year would bring another slim loss to Izuchukwu Bakes. That was until one of her team members, Chinedu, decided to think outside the box and explore recipes and ingredients they had never before thought to use.

Chinedu had spent the entire month before the contest baking cookies in his apartment with his new set of recipes. Whenever he happened on a recipe that could work, he would bake a bunch of cookies and take them to the bakery for the team to taste and review. Despite having all of his experiments fail to produce any significant effects on his teammates, Chinedu continued to explore and test out new recipes, and one night, whilst fighting off fatigue-induced sleep, he happened upon a magical formula. When he pulled the tray of cookies out of his oven that night, the aroma alone caused his sleepiness to disappear. He knew, instantly, that he had discovered the recipe that would secure the title for Omekannaya. 

After a taste-test some minutes later and a taste-test at the bakery the following day with the team, he was sure he had finally found the secret ingredient. He was also confident that it was the ingredient that was responsible for Izuchukwu’s numerous wins, so he believed that applied the right way, and in the right quantity, Omekannaya would win the contest that year.

***

“What’s that in your hand?” Ginika asked with a frown on her face.

Chinedu sneered as he lifted the transparent sachet higher so all the members of the group could see it. “It is the secret ingredient that will solve all of our problems…” he announced. 

Ginika didn’t know what the content of the sachet was, but she was open to receiving a miracle. She’d had had low expectations when Chinedu brought her the cookies the previous day for tasting, but she’d instantly seen the promise in his recipe when she took a bite and chewed on it. There was a distinct taste to the cookie, it was unlike anything she had ever put in her mouth. There was a soothing effect that settled on her as she swallowed mouthfuls of the cookies, unable to hold herself back because of how heavenly it tasted. By the time she cleared the tray he brought her, she was sure it was the right recipe. She just knew it. She could feel it in every cell of her body.

Once she was sure he had the right recipe, Ginika asked Chinedu to return the following day with more cookies and with his secret recipe. She told him she would only gather a select-few of the top brass at the company to meet with him in order to keep the recipe secret, she didn’t want his discovery being leaked to the competition.

“Tell us about this ingredient, Chinedu,” said Agwu. He was the head of the team that handled mixing of ingredients for the baking contest and he was eager to know what Chinedu’s recipe was, and how he had made the breakthrough that Agwu’s team had failed to make despite having over fourteen people working on the same problem day and night. “What is it?” 

Chinedu took a step back from the table in the conference room and shook the sachet he was dangling between his fingers. “Some people call it LSD, but I call it the Master Key. With the right dose, the Master Key will open the same doors, for us, that it has been opening for Izuchukwu Bakes.”