The road less travelled...

Title: Baking Misadventures
Author: katherine_b
Rating: G
Prompt Word: 1 - Envious
Word Count: 524
A/N: Written for the Weekly Drabble Challenge, and it’s not 100 words because I really can’t write that few!

“A-ha!”

Donna jumped violently, the spatula she had been using to scrape the remains of the cake out of the bowl falling to the floor with a dull ‘flop’. She spun on her heel, adrenalin racing, to find herself face-to-face with a smugly grinning Time Lord.

“What the hell was that for?” she demanded, slapping him on the shoulder. She was aiming for his face, but he was ready and ducked out of the way in time.

“I caught you!” The Doctor pointed at her, dancing around the room in obvious delight. “I caught you at last, Miss ‘I’m so proper I would never do anything as bad as eat the cake scrapings’!”

“Well,” she shot back, recovering quickly, “considering how quickly you eat your way through the finished product, the scrapings are the only part I’m likely to get!”

“Oh, now that’s not fair!” He stopped and looked deeply wounded. “I always offer you some.”

“Hah! Do you have any idea what a slice of cake would do to me? It’d go straight to my thighs, that’s what! You have no idea how envious I am of you! I’d kill to be able to get away with eating the amount you do!”

“Well, that’s as may be, but as least you can cook,” he retorted. “Remember what happened last time I tried to bake a cake?”

“It was all going fine until you decided to repair the toaster oven,” she told him, suppressing an almost overwhelming desire to grin like a Cheshire cat. “And if you’d stayed in the kitchen instead of going to your workroom, you’d have smelled as the cake was starting to burn. That way the oven would never have caught fire.”

“Or,” he suggested teasingly, “you could just have saved yourself the stress and cooked it for me when I asked you to.”

“Or,” she imitated him mockingly, “you could have actually paid attention when I said I was going to take a bath. That way you wouldn’t have been expecting me to keep an eye on your precious cake rather than have me run in half-naked and dripping wet when the smoke alarm went off.”

He shrugged uncomfortably, but his eyes lit up as he peered around her at the bowl on the bench. She grabbed his ear and pulled him back to face her, ready to continue her lecture. However he took advantage of his long arms to stick a hand into the bowl, scooping up some of the mix that clung to the sides, popping the mix-covered digit into his mouth.

“Honestly, I don’t know why you bother to cook it,” he mumbled around his finger. “Tastes better like this anyway.”

“Oh, really?”

She glared at him – and then, very deliberately, picked up the tin that was ready to go into the oven and turned it upside down over him so that the uncooked mix ran out over his head, shoulders and down his body.

He stared at her for a long moment in silence, peering through the banana-flavoured gloop running down his face, before holding out a hand.

“Can I at least have a bowl?”