So not everything was real in her pantry, she could live with that. Fabricated products were pretty stable, mostly reliable and she wasn’t asking anything complex of them. Cookies were pretty basic, gently leavened, gaining structure from flour and sugar and some richness from butter. The chocolate chips were fabricated, the process of making them would be too much to expect of a space crew she supposed so she oughtn’t complain at all. That there were chocolate chips in the first place was enough. 

She hummed as she worked, no song in particular thought bits and pieces of a whole host of songs worked their way in, melodies Antigone had worked out on the clarinet or Pop songs she’d listened to surreptitiously on her ear buds while being ignored at family dinners. For all that they were from varied sources her humming, though not expert, made something whole and charming from the Hodge-podge. While she hummed she measured and mixed and melted, bringing about an alchemy of ingredients that turned simple basics into something divine, all without a written recipe. Chocolate Chip cookies were written in the fabric of her heart and she needed no record of how to make them. The cookie, in her mind, was one of the best things in the world. A small, manageable, portable bit of durable sweetness. It was good hot, it was good cold, it was good dipped in milk or simply consumed straight. It made nearly everyone smile and there were so many damn ways to make them one never got bored. 

In her pudgy, dexterous hands the first batch was in the oven in moments. She stayed put, looking through the glass doors of the oven, her eyes glued to the pan, watching, noting. The oven was new to her and though the gauge said one temperature she’d come to learn after working in a few places that ovens could be temperamental. She knew that the temperatures weren’t always even and if she did not know her ovens like good friends, things could get hairy. Cookies could suffer and she couldn’t have that. So she watched and noted that the far left corner browned up first and the front right did not. Easy enough, she thought with a dimpled smile that only the cookies saw. She could just turn the pan and all would be happy. 

The rest of that batch went without hitch and soon the kitchen filled with the scent of warm cookies, a scent that seemed to come from the pan as much as from the baker. Early diners were lured by it, their noses raising to catch the scent and only those who had experienced violently ill reactions to cryo-sleep were unaffected by the scent. The second batch followed the first and while she was slipping the first round off of the pan she slipped eight of the twelve onto two plates. 

For all that she wasn’t small and slight, Penny moved with a quiet that surprised people. She slipped in-between the people who moved about the kitchen and a plate of four still warm cookies found their way onto Josie’s spot and a plate of four cookies studded with meltingly perfect chocolate found their way next to where Henry worked.