I’ve written about E’s love of cooking and baking before, and our time at home has allowed her to expand her horizons in many directions. She has become a wizard at breakfast goodies like pancakes and waffles. She can whip up just about any flavor muffin or cupcake you’d like. She’s more than happy to make an old favorite or go crazy and try something new.

I’d say she’s about 99% confident when it comes to her skills in the kitchen, and she’s reach about a 75% success rate when it comes to how things turn out. Something strange has happened in the last few weeks, though. She took on an apprentice.

I learned very early on in the shutdown that the more snacks and junk food I brought into the house, the more snacks and junk food would be consumed. There also seemed to be a direct correlation between how much junk food there was and how quickly it was consumed.

Everyone was well aware there was junk food, and they had to hurry up and eat it before everyone else got to it. After a week or two of that nonsense, and having my secret stash of Reese’s cups cleaned out several times, I just stopped buying it.

For a week or two everyone just opened the fridge and stared at all the fresh fruit and vegetable snack options and complained that there was nothing to eat. Then, the boys remembered that their little sister knew the magic and could whip up brownies and cookies and lots of other goodies. And, at first, she obliged.

However, when they started eating the treats faster than she could make them, and she stopped getting her own share of her hard-earned sweets, she put her foot down.

“You know, you could always learn to make them yourselves,” she yelled, storming out of the kitchen.

And another week or two went by and everyone continued to complain about the lack of snacks. Finally, it got to be too much. G cracked. He went to the shelf of cookbooks and took down a small book of cookies. Flipping through the pages, he settled on a fudge brownie cookie recipe.

Knowing better than to even ask me about it, he went right to his little sister. Pretty soon, I heard E issuing orders like a drill sergeant. The Wonderful Husband and I exchanged glances, wondering if we would be called on to referee the argument that was about to break out or if we should prepare the fire extinguishers.

For once, G seemed to admit he was clueless and willingly took orders from the kitchen boss. Eavesdropping on their little operation, I quickly determined she was delegating all the not so fun jobs to her assistant. He didn’t seem to mind, though, and went about learning the difference between “Tbsp.” and “tsp.” and granulated and powdered sugar. I was quite impressed when E even remembered our faux double boiler method, and had him melting chocolate like a pro.

In about 45 minutes, they presented a dozen jumbo fudgy brownie cookies, perfectly crackled on top, and chewy on the inside. They quickly disappeared with a few glasses of cold milk. I could tell that it pained G to see his hard work disappear so quickly, but as he polished off more than one plate of cookies in his day, he knew better than to complain.

Over the next couple days, a new treat appeared in the kitchen almost daily. One day I found a chocolate layer cake, complete with vanilla buttercream frosting, decorated with sliced cherries. After a few hours, the cherries bled into the frosting, giving it a rather macabre look, but since the cake didn’t last too much longer than that, it wasn’t a big deal.

All of a sudden, my shopping list started to get some pretty interesting items on it: different types of flours, flavorings, chocolates, treacle. Yes. Treacle. Somewhere along the way, I had picked up a cookbook that was inspired by Harry Potter, Dungeons and Dragons, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, The Lord of the Rings, and just about any other story out there that had a food item associated with it.

It was one of those books that I picked up, planning on an elaborate food buffet for a Halloween party, and then realized that most of the recipes weren’t very practical. It was also printed by a European publisher, and most of the ingredient lists were in weights.

G was undeterred though. He found a recipe for Butterbeer and it did seem simple enough: butter, sugar and some syrup, boiled together and then added to cream soda. By the time he called me in to help with his first batch, he already had a solid chunk of caramel in the bottom of his saucepan. That wasn’t going to do a thing when added to the soda, except float. So, we started the recipe over and I supervised. And we ended up with the same thing.

So, I started Googling all the ingredients to see if they were possibly called something else in Great Britain. The only thing we could figure out was that maybe the sugar we were using was the wrong kind of sugar. Since the only other kind of sugar we had was powdered sugar, we decided to give that a whirl. We also decided to decrease the amount of syrup and add it incrementally. This time, we were sort of successful. At least everything stayed in a liquid form. However, when we added it to the soda, it seemed to separate out, leaving the butter bits congealing on the top of the cream, which was pretty unappetizing. G stood by his creation though and drank it down, declaring it “just about as good as it was at Universal!” Even though I disagreed, I admired his attitude.

When it comes to magic in the kitchen, I think the most unlikely trick has been getting two of them to work together and the third one to be complimentary of the end results. I’m looking forward to more of their collaborations.

Liz Pinkey is a contributing writer to the Times News. Her column appears weekly in our Saturday feature section.