Extra Story: The Bear Makes Bear Bread with Mil — Part One

Extra Story:
The Bear Makes Bear Bread with Mil
Part One

 

HI! My name is Mil, I’m twelve, and I’m one of the girls working at Yuna’s bakery.

It’s been a while since Yuna came to the orphanage. She’s cool. Yuna gave me work looking after birds, warm food and clothes, and a room (that’s right, a room). On top of that, since she was opening a bakery, she said she wanted help.

Apparently, she wanted kids who could read and write and do math. And guess what? I could do all that. Even better, she really wanted kids who liked cooking. I raised my hand.

“I want to do it.”

Before I knew it, there were six kids plus me, and we were going to work at the bakery. First, she introduced us to Morin, who was the lady who was gonna teach us how to make bread. She had a daughter named Karin.

Morin was super strict but real kind. Karin was real cheerful, even if she was older than us. First Karin taught us how to make bread, but she also taught us how to serve customers, how to say hi to them, how to deal with money, clean, and more. If we didn’t learn how to do those things right, it would be really bad, she said, and the customers would walk away. If we got the cost of the bread wrong, then someone would lose money. If the shop was dirty, then the customers would just not come anymore! We learned all kinds of things from Karin that were important for the shop. Morin smiled from the side while we did. I wonder why?

 

The day the shop opened, pudding, bread, and pizza orders came in like a big ol’ thunderstorm rain. It was tough. Karin gave us directions so we wouldn’t get mixed up. I dunno what we’d have done without her. It would’ve been messy.

“Wipe down the table by the running bear.”

“Yes, ma’am!”

“Clean up the table with the sleeping bear.”

Karin used the bears decorating the tops of the tables for her directions. That was real smart, and it helped us go fast—you could remember which bear was on what table easy. Since lunchtime was the busiest, things got less crazy in the afternoon.

I was way happy for the bread and pudding we made, cuz it sold great! The pudding we made from the eggs was even more popular. I thought it was a little expensive, or maybe even very, very, very expensive. Tiermina said it was a fair price, but we were getting a lot of money. It was kinda like a dream to see that much money in real life?

Tiermina said it would be good for the orphanage to have it. This money would turn into warm meals and warm clothes, which seemed crazy, but I didn’t think she meant it would really do that, because she wouldn’t say something like that. Anyway, I didn’t want to go back to how we were before Yuna came, so I worked real hard, as hard as I could.

When we worked at the shop, we would wear bear outfits. They were real cute! It made me kinda happy since I would look like Yuna. But Karin apparently wouldn’t wear one because she said it was embarrassing.

(I hope nobody tells her, but I don’t get that at all.)

The customers liked these bear outfits too! They would always tell us that we were cute. Maybe it was a little embarrassing, but it made me happy. Isn’t that the important part?

 

We finished things one day, and the next one was gonna be our day off.

After every six days of work, we got one free day. It’s way important to rest, everyone says, and I say so too! We could do anything when we had a break. I did a lot of things, like help with work at the orphanage. That day there was a new bread I wanted to make, so I went to a shop.

When I went there, Karin was already making bread. On days off, Karin would bake for the orphanage. It was for practice, apparently. “Mil, why are you here?”

“There was some bread I wanted to make real quick.”

The other day, I’d brought back bread to the orphanage. I’d made it myself. Everyone at the orphanage would eat the extra bread and the practice bread. Once, one of the small girls at the orphanage asked me something. “Isn’t there any bear bread?”

When I asked her what she meant, she told me she meant bread shaped like a bear. Since she was still small, she had apparently combined the Bear’s Lounge name with being a bakery and thought that we made bear bread.

So…I went to the shop to make bear bread! I put on my bear uniform and got ready to make it.

First, I kneaded the dough. Then I made it into a bear shape. I did it like this: I made the legs, made the arms, and made a round, poofy tail. I couldn’t make a good face. It didn’t look much like a bear. Maybe an animal, but not a bear…

I went to look at the bear ornaments inside the shop.

They were very cute bears! According to Yuna, making something scary like this cute was called “cartoonifying”? Let’s see, how could you make a bear cute? I looked carefully at one and shaped the bear bread on a nearby table, but…nope. No matter how much I tried to copy the ornament, the bread didn’t look good.

I was fighting really hard to get it right when someone called out to me. “Mil, what are you doing?”

When I looked up, I saw Yuna!

When I told her what I was doing, she looked at my hands. I felt a little embarrassed. “I was copying this bear to make bear bread.”

“Bear what?” Yuna looked real curious.

“Someone at the orphanage said she wanted to eat bear bread, so I tried making it! But I can’t make it look as nice as the bears you made.”

When I told her that, Yuna looked at the bear bread I had made. It kinda made me feel bad, because it looked so wrong. “Um, please don’t look too close.”

“Is it the body that’s hard?”

“Mmhm. And the face too. That’s harder.”

Actually, out of all of it, the face was hardest. When I looked at Yuna… Oh, no… She looked sad, or like she was thinking real hard. Was my bear bread that bad?

“You’re not making this for the shop, are you?” she asked.

“No, I wanted to make it for the other kids to eat.”

“You really mean that?”

For some reason, she asked a few more times in different ways. I nodded. I didn’t really understand, but Yuna looked like she had made up her mind.

“Could you let me borrow the dough for a bit?” she asked.

“Uh-huh!”

I let her have two different colored doughs, and she started to knead them each lightly. I’d prepped them thinking that the white dough could look like Kumakyu and the brown dough could look like Kumayuru. Yuna rounded out the brown dough into a ball and flattened it slightly to make a disk. She put new, small pieces of dough on the disk and put some of the white dough on it to form the shape of the bread.

Now that she had gotten this far, I understood what she was doing too.

“It’s a bear’s face!”

Yuna had made a bear face. Yuna’s hands were almost exactly like Morin’s…it was like magic!

“Bake it like this, and it’ll be done,” she said. “It’s easier to make just the face versus the whole body, right?”

Yeah, I could tell it was a bear just by looking at the face. And it looked so easy. It looked like something I could make too. “Could I try?”

“Go for it.”

I copied Yuna and kneaded the dough. I made two bear faces with it. They looked a little different from Yuna’s, but I could do it!

“There we go! Let’s fire these up, eh?”

“Yeah!”

We borrowed the stone oven Karin was using to bake bread.

“What did you make?” she asked us.

Yuna shook her head gravely. I nodded. “It’s a secret until it’s done baking,” I told Karin.

I was so excited to see it baked that I waited in front of the oven. It was hot, but I beared with it. I could see it rising.

Once we pulled the bread out of the oven, the bear bread was done. Karin peeked at it. “Looks like a bear face. You did a great job. I think the right one is a little better though.”

“Yuna made the right one. I made the left one.”

“No worries, Mil,” said Karin. “Once you practice, you’ll get better. Everyone starts as a beginner.”

Jeez. Just watching Yuna, I felt like she could do anything. Was there anything she couldn’t do? I wanted to be more like her!

 

“Well, how about we taste test these?” Yuna asked.

“Okay.”

It felt kind of like a waste to eat them, even if they were just normal bread. But Yuna didn’t seem bothered, and she pulled off one of the bear’s ears. I felt kind of bad for the poor bear bread.

“Can I try some too?” asked Karin. She tore off some of Yuna’s and took a bite. “Looks like it’s baked through.”

“Huh. You know, we could put something in this,” said Yuna.

That did sound pretty yummy…

“You’re not going to have some, Mil?” Yuna asked me.

I kept holding the bear, but… “I feel like it’s kind of a waste.”

“Ehh. I get it, but it’d really be a waste to let it go uneaten. You should at least try it.”

Yeah! I needed to make sure it tasted good. I also tore off a bear ear and ate it. It was delicious. But now the bear was missing an ear.

A little sad, but definitely tasty!

 

Then Karin joined in and we thought about what we could use to fill the bread and what flavors to use, and we made all kinds of bear bread. We made a few mistakes, but they all were delicious mistakes! I knew they’d be glad to eat ’em.

Then I brought our efforts home to the orphanage. The super little kids picked up the bread in their tiny hands. But the bear bread was so big and difficult to eat that I had to split the heads in half in front of them, which made them start crying.

“The bear!” All of them just wouldn’t stop crying. I said sorry again and again. Since we’d broken them in half when we were testing them—I mean Yuna and Karin and me—I was used to just doing that without thinking. I felt sad back then, too, but it was so yummy I’d forgotten!

I pulled out a new bear bread for them. They spent an eternity treating the bread like it was very important, but they had to eat it at some point. The little kids apologized to the bears real seriously (“I’m sorry, bear”) before they ate it.

 

A few days later, we started to lay out bear bread in the shop. When Yuna saw that, she looked like she wasn’t sure about something. I wonder why?