Frosted Living Rooms

Fred and George were standing in the kitchen behind the table, with a giant pan of…well…it was supposed to be gingerbread, but they guessed it was more like bricks now. Not completely though, Fred’s batch was bricks, George’s batch was ashes. But they decided that that wasn’t much better.

Someone (namely them) had come up with the brilliant idea to surprise their wives with a gingerbread castle when they got back from Christmas shopping. Somehow, at this point in time, they were more worried about making sure they didn’t greet them with a mess than a gingerbread castle.

Fred glanced back at the cookbook that was lying, covered in flour and vanilla and in the process of hardening so bad that you couldn’t even shut the book, much less use it, and decided that they must have baked it too long. George was standing by the trashcan, whacking Fred’s pan of attempted gingerbread against the side, trying to get the brick off the baking sheet. When he finally figured out to twist the pan, however, it was no longer over the trashcan. It was about three feet about his left foot.

“OWWW!” Fred heard a scream coming from over near wherever George had found the trashcan today (lately it had been moving, never staying in one place for very long, and really getting on Angelina’s nerves). So he rushed over there, forgetting about shutting the oven door, and found his twin lying on the ground in the garage, holding his foot, which seemed to be broken, only a few feet away from Fred’s gingerbread, which was on the rock hard cement floor, and, of course, unbroken.

Fred cast the only healing charm he knew (they were generally more concerned with making trouble than learning how to fix it), and it was a good thing he did, because next thing they knew, they heard what was unmistakably the sound of a cat screaming coming from the kitchen. The two ran in there as quickly as they could, which really wasn’t very quick at all, as Fred tripped over the couch and George tripped over all three of the steps. The first thing they saw was a small column of smoke drifting through the air above the stove, and when they went closer to investigate, Fred and Angelina’s cat climbing out of the oven with the whole left side of it’s fur burnt off. It wasn’t burned anywhere else, just the fur on its left side. The poor cat had apparently decided that that would be a good place for a warm nap. But it got a little too warm.

The two burst out laughing at the hilarity of it all, and were still trying to calm down when they heard the door open. “George…what if that’s Angelina-?” Fred started.

“-or Katie?” George interrupted.

“We’re doomed.” They said in unison. But the person who walked into their living room, clutching a bag of Bertie Botts Every Flavor Beans wasn’t their wives, but was actually Ron, staring hard at one bean, trying to figure out if it was safe to eat.

“Hey guys, what do you reckon this is?” he began, still staring intently ay the bean. When he looked up, an astounding sight met his eyes. Somewhere along the line of mixing up a batch of gingerbread, the two twins had somehow managed to get batter all over the room, on the ceiling, all the walls, and especially themselves. He sniffed lightly, and caught the scent of burning hair. The cat stalked into view, and Ron stared at its strange haircut. After about thirty seconds of silence, he started staring at Fred and George almost as intently as he had been watching that bean earlier. “Merlin…what did you guys DO!”

They just looked at each other, and turned back to Ron. “You wouldn’t happen to know how to make a gingerbread castle, would you?”

Ron walked calmly over to the fire, got a pinch of floo powder, and stuck his head in the fire. “Hermione! Emergency over at Fred and George’s!” They heard a loud, exaggerated sigh, and then the swooshing of robes as Hermione collided with Ron, who hadn’t had the sense to take his head out of the fireplace.

“Ron!” she cried, disentangling her from him and picking herself off the floor. Trying to look dignified and failing miserably, she walked over to the two, taking in the room and all its disaster in stride. “What did you do and what were you attempting to do?” she asked with the air of someone who was used to helping people out of tight situations, which she was.

They shook their heads and smiled pityingly, “You know Hermione, there isn’t always a difference.”

She looked at them like they were crazy, which they very well might be, and said, “Yes there is, and you really shouldn’t be talking, as I’m the one who’s going to get you out of this mess.”

They looked at each other and said, “True.” And she did help them, she showed them how to mix the batter without spraying it all over, and that setting the oven at 500 degrees didn’t help it cook faster, it just burnt it to ashes. She also taught Fred that the dishwasher was NOT an alternate oven, and thus, you should not try to bake anything in it.

As she left them with trays of gingerbread, perfectly made so that it was soft enough to eat, but hard enough not to fall apart, she called back, “But if you need more help, do me a favor and call Ginny.”

Ten seconds after she had flooed away, they were using the fireplace to ask Ginny to please come help them with this, PLEASE. And of course she did.

The next few minutes were a blur to all of them, but wound up resulting in a frosting fight, and the house getting decorated more than the castle. Let’s just say…about three minutes later, the three of them closely resembled snowmen, and the house, on the inside at least, looked more like an igloo than any of them had ever believed a house could.

Harry walked in as they were trying to unstick themselves from the frosting, and surveyed the damage, saying, “What did you do, have a frosting war?” as he tasted the wall.

They seemed unwilling to admit that that had been exactly what they had been doing, but he still found himself drafted into the Fred and George rescue league and spent a lot of that afternoon cleaning frosting off the walls and stopping the sprinkle fight moments after it started, minimizing the amount of cleaning that that required.

In the end, the castle just got decorated with whatever had landed on it during the wars, but Angelina and Katie still loved it. When they got home, the first thing they noticed was that there was a giant brick in the garage, (the trashcan had moved again) there was a faint smell of burning cat hair filling the house, and that it was cleaner than it had been when they left.

“Fred, what did you DO? It looks incredible!” Angelina cried when she saw the castle.

“It was supposed to be a gingerbread castle and if you look at it this way-” he tilted his head to the side.

“Oh, guys, even if it looked as far from a castle as possible,” Which it did, but they weren’t going to say that, “we would still love it, because you two spent so much time on it.”

“So, does that mean that if we spend a lot of time on a prank, you’ll love it?” George wanted to know.

The women just glanced at each other and said, “Well…um…maybe we should rephrase that-“ but before they could finish, the cat walked into the room.

Angelina turned to Fred with her best You’d-Better-Have-A-Good-Explanation-For-This look on, and asked the million dollar question, “Why is all Twinkle’s hair burned off?”