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Canterlot Cooking Calamity

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Canterlot Cooking Calamity is an My Little Pony: Equestria Girls fic written by MythrilMoth.

In order to raise money for upcoming events, Canterlot High holds a fundraiser bake sale and cooking contest. Some students enter for fun. Some students enter because they have something to prove. Others have their eyes on the prizes.

This is gonna be a piece of cake...right?


This work provides examples of the following tropes:

  • Butt-Monkey: Poor Fluttershy doesn't have a lot go well for her in the fic. She eats one of Pinkie's Blue Dip Cookies and ends up with a massive sugar high, has to ride with Sugar Sprinkles to CHS for the bake sale, and finally ends up stoned from Sandalwood pot brownies flirts with everyone she sees, Big Macintosh especially.
  • The Cameo: Sugarcoat and the other students from Crystal Prep make an appearance in Sonata's volunteer cooking class.
  • Cordon Bleugh Chef: Snips and Snails and their... unique food combinations. Their meals aren't disgusting exactly, just unconventional and their inventiveness does get them past the preliminaries.
  • Crippling Overspecialization: A lot of the cooking contest competitors suffer from this:
    • Flash and his band are relying almost entirely on grilling their meals and using Angus Sentry's special barbecue sauce to maximize the flavor. Ms. Harshwinny bluntly states the only reason Flash and co. made it to the semi-final round is because their earlier opponents were Snips and Snails.
    • Trixie is a surprisingly talented chef, but her over reliance on steak dishes and playing her best dish too early costs her on creativity.
    • Negra Arroyo downplays this since he's got plenty of variety in his dishes, except for how they're all Mexican.
  • Curb-Stomp Battle: A few of the rounds go like this.
    • Flash, Beats, and Skunk destroy Snips and Snails in the quarterfinals with a back-up meal plan since Snips and Snails are Cordon Bleugh Chefs, before ending up on the receiving end of one themselves against Negra Arroyo.
    • Trixie curb-stomps that CMCs in the quarterfinals as well
    • Sunset, Twilight and Rarity get a perfect score against Lyra and Bon Bon before the latter two even present their meal in the quarterfinals, and then get another perfect score against Trixie in the semis.
  • Dead All Along: Turns out Angus Sentry is this. He died twenty years prior to the events of this story.
  • Disappears into Light: Angus Sentry finally passes on from the realm of the living when he declares Flash worthy of being the successor of his barbeque sauce recipe
  • The Dreaded: Flash's Grandfather, Angus Sentry, is essentially this to Flash and the rest of his family. Flash dreads facing him when he plans on retrieving his Grandfather's special barbeque sauce for the cooking contest. He brings along medicine to subdue his grandfather if they ever come across him, which is a shotgun loaded with salt rock.
  • Drives Like Crazy: Sugar Sprinkles is this. When Fluttershy and Big Mac are unable to make it to the school due to respective car troubles and a buffalo pride parade that does not seem to end, Sugar Sprinkles comes to the rescue. While she makes it to the school on time, her driving leaves Fluttershy vomiting from the experience and Big Mac jumping out and kissing the ground.
  • Epic Fail:
    • Sweetie Belle's attempts at cooking before getting lessons. She used to think cereal came with milk inside the box.
    • The bake sale downplays this as it makes a fair a mount of money, but Pinkie considers it a disaster between Diamond Tiara bringing in a bunch of pastries she bought from a bakery instead of making herself, and Sandalwood bringing pot brownies that Fluttershy gets into. Ironically, Fluttershy's flirty nature while stoned is part of what keeps the bake sale from being a complete failure since she sells a lot of goods by flirting with customers.
    • Played for Drama with Saffron Masala's quarter finals dish. She accidentally uses rancid meat she got from her family's restaurant freezer, immediately disqualifying her. She's understandably embarrassed and horrified.
  • Everyone Has Standards:
    • Her name isn't stated, but a girl who fits the description of Sugarcoat tells Sonata that she is messed up for peeing on hobos because she doesn't really consider them as people.
    • Pinky is horrified that Sandalwood brought pot brownies to a school bake sale and really lays into him how his stunt could not only get the school sued, but how it is common sense to not bring this kind of dessert to a public setting, much less one that takes place in a high school.
  • Final Boss: Negra Arroyo is who Sunset, Twilight and Rarity face in the final round of the cooking competition.
  • Food Porn: It is a fanfic that is centered around a bake sale and a cooking contest, emphasis on the latter. The story is not afraid to go into detail about the kinds of dishes that are being made.
  • Giant Enemy Crab: A giant coconut crab is among the horde of live crabs of various sizes and species delivered to Negra Arroyo for his final dish. It menaces Rarity for a hot minute before Rainbow Dash kicks it away.
  • G-Rated Drug:
    • Pinky Pie's Blue Dip Cookies seem to be this. But rather than making someone high, it makes them really hyper on sugar instead. One of the symptoms is vibrating on the spot and talking a mile a minute as Fluttershy found out the hard way.
    • Played straight with Fluttershy when she eats Sandalwood's pot brownies without knowing there is marijuana in them. Consuming them makes her very flirtatious with both boys and girls.
  • Hidden Depths: Nobody was expecting Trixie to be as good a chef as she is.
    • Snips and Snails mix their own chipotle ranch for their first dish and despite Sunset's suspicion, it turns out they can cook, if like "lazy fratboys".
  • Jerkass Has a Point: Negra Arroyo is very much an egotistical ass of a student, but he's not wrong when he tells Saffron Masala after she's disqualified for accidentally using rancid meat she needs to scour her family's restaurant for any other expired food because it's a health code violation that could get her and her family in serious trouble.
  • The Juggernaut: Angus Sentry. Even the mineral salt shotgun shells Flash packs to hold him off barely slow him down.
  • Kids Raiding the Wine Cabinet: Lyra and Bon Bon claim they asked the former's mother for wine to use in their coq au vin, but Bon Bon's insistence that they only used it for cooking implies they sometimes partake in this to drink it.
  • Lethal Chef: Sweetie Bell is this considering that she seems to combine several different types of recipes thinking that it's only one. She also seems to wonder why cereal never comes with milk.
  • Made of Iron: Angus Sentry. He can apparently survive being shot at with salt rocks from a sawed off shot gun. Makes sense because Angus Sentry was Dead All Along.
  • No. Just... No: Scootaloo says this word for word when a dish of black goop that Sweetie Belle whipped up is supposed to be a grilled cheese sandwich.
  • Offscreen Teleportation: Angus Sentry can do this since he's a ghost.
  • Sore Loser: Subverted by Trixie of all people. After losing to Sunset, Twilight and Rarity's nachos in the semi-finals she demands to judge them herself, only to immediately concede after trying them and happily munch on a share of her own.
    • Negra Arroyo initially doesn't take losing to Sunset, Twilight and Rarity's deep dish pizza well, especially since Rainbow Dash is among the judges. However, he backs down after a stern talking to be Celestia.
  • Stealth Insult: After Ms. Harshwinny criticizes his decision to make enchiladas for his quarter-final dish, Negra Arroyo makes his semi-final dish with a secret ingredient called "verga del toro" aka a bull's penis; essentially telling the judges to "eat a dick" and succeeding. Only Shining Armor and Pinkie figure out what it actually is thanks to Shiny looking it up on his phone.
  • The Stoner: Sandalwood, given he brings pot brownies to the school bake sale against all common sense. Fluttershy's parents admit they also used marijuana when they were younger, and that they conceived Fluttershy while stoned at one point.
  • Supreme Chef: Character's either are this already, or prove they can be.
    • Sunset, Twilight and Rarity are the only team to achieve more than one perfect score and are ultimately the winners of the contest.
    • Flash Sentry, Brawly Beats and Skunk Rock aren't bad chefs and using Angus Sentry's barbecue sauce helps them immensely. Angus himself could be considered this since he made the sauce in the first place.
    • Negra Arroyo is the most straightforward example. He's the only other competitor to achieve a perfect score on a dish and serves as the Final Boss for Sunset, Twilight and Rarity.
    • Saffron Masala is implied to be this as well, when she's not accidentally using rancid or expired ingredients. Part of why she enters the contest is to prove to herself she's as capable of cooking as her father.
  • Suspiciously Specific Denial: Bon Bon insists the wine she and Lyra used for their coq au vin is only for cooking. Celestia doesn't buy it, but brushes it aside.
  • The Tease: Fluttershy is quite the flirt when she's under the influence of marijuana.
  • Wins by Doing Absolutely Nothing: Downplayed since he did cook a dish, but Negra Arroyo wins his quarter-final round against Saffron Masala because the latter is disqualified for accidentally using rancid meat in her dish.

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