Chapter 80: The Tycoon’s Fitting Room

(Biting my finger, wishing for collection, wishing for votes, wishing for reviews, may everything go smoothly next Monday, someone is going on a business trip again, a miserable April, waiting for the May holiday.) Occupying the prime front row seats, Su and Yang inevitably became the first to be taste-tested. As Teacher Pei Luo walked into the classroom, he immediately saw the ashen-faced Su Ziceng and Yan Wuxu. He first nodded to Wen Maixue, then glanced at the dessert made by Su Ziceng and the others. It was pitch-black, a generous amount of cocoa powder indeed. "The flavor is quite light." Teacher Pei Luo took a bite. "Not enough cream." Wen Maixue also took a bite, her eyebrows raised like a joyful note. "Quite crunchy," Teacher Pei Luo took another bite. "Baked a bit too hard," Wen Maixue thought about the taste in her mouth, and the note jumped a bit higher. "It even has a hint of alcohol," Teacher Pei Luo said after finishing an entire piece. "Didn’t you use fresh lemon? But the seasoning wine does taste quite appropriate." From beginning to end, this was the only somewhat neutral comment Wen Maixue made. After hearing this not overly harsh critique, Yan Wuxu regained some confidence. She eagerly asked Teacher Pei Luo, "Teacher, can you give us a summary?" "It actually suits my taste quite well." Teacher Pei Luo’s eyes, which could charm hordes, twinkled with satisfaction: "I don’t like desserts with too heavy a cream flavor or that are excessively soft." Is that a compliment? Su Ziceng questioned Teacher Pei Luo’s words, but upon seeing Wen Maixue’s utterly disgusted expression, she immediately started to fawn over Teacher Pei Luo as well. "Teacher Pei Luo, if you like, you can take some back with you." She randomly grabbed a few pieces and threw them into the loosely tied packaging bag. "With sweets like ladyfingers, it’s better not to eat too much of them." Teacher Pei Luo still declined Su Ziceng’s kindness. Su Ziceng’s enthusiastic hands paused. Ladyfingers? Both Yan Wuxu and Su Ziceng looked at the square things in the baking mold, covered in several layers of sugary dust; their smiles melted like cheese in a frying pan. "Teacher, we made tiramisu today!" A zealous student eager to "correct the mistake" pointed to the recipe on the whiteboard as a reminder. The classroom fell into a brief, eerie silence. "It does look a bit like ladyfingers." Wen Maixue suppressed the urge to burst into laughter and nodded. "Had it been ladyfingers, I would’ve given your group full marks, but since it’s tiramisu, you’re not qualified for this class. You will have to retake it." "Is tiramisu considered a simple dessert?" After class, Su Ziceng resentfully put the few pieces of ladyfinger-like tiramisu that could "make a sound when thrown to the ground" into the packaging bag. "Don’t worry, Senior Sister Wen demonstrated again at the end. Next class, we will definitely make a tiramisu that meets the requirements." Yan Wuxu was tidying up the utensils on the counter. "Are you going to take these pieces back with you?" "Why wouldn’t I take them back?" Su Ziceng bit into one, and despite it being tough, it tasted a bit like chocolate cookies. "I paid for the ingredients; I can’t let them go to waste." "We could have been taught something much simpler, like cream cookies," Su Ziceng still wasn’t giving up, recalling that night when that girl gave Pello a bag of cookies. Even if Wen Maixue had intended to make things difficult for them, seeing Wen Maixue’s demonstration, even Su Ziceng had to admit defeat. "After you’ve made a hundred slices of tiramisu, you will understand how to grasp the proportions and flavors." Wen Maixue made a whole piece of tiramisu and shared it with the female students for tasting. Su Ziceng grudgingly admired Wen Maixue’s tiramisu as she ate; it was soft, of the right thickness, and rich in the fragrance of cheese and cocoa. It was like two people of contrasting skin colors, a light-skinned and a dark-skinned beauty, looking at each other from afar, neither jealous nor envious, yet complementing each other and enhancing the deliciousness of the pastry. "Practice makes perfect. When I first started helping my mom, I often didn’t do well either," Yang Wuxu comforted her as they sat in the car from the Su family that came to pick them up. "Did your family’s driver change?" Yang Wuxu asked, noticing the new driver in the front seat; the previous driver who had come to pick up Su Ziceng was older. Upon hearing this, the new driver turned around and explained, "Uncle Zhong is getting on in years, so he has gone back to his hometown." Earlier on, Su Ziceng heard that Uncle Zhong had been specifically assigned to Su Qingzhang, but in just a few months, he had been let go. Uncle Zhong had watched her grow up and was around fifty years old, neither too old nor too young. If you really calculated it, he wasn’t of retirement age yet. For a moment, Su Ziceng was at a loss for words, as she began to sense something was not quite right. After arriving at the Su Family residence, Yang Wuxu busied herself admiring the luxurious decorations in the room, while Su Ziceng’s attention was entirely devoted to the people in the room. Ever since Chang Mei became the housekeeper, she managed the Su Family household in an orderly manner, but all her subordinates were still the old servants from Su Qingzhang’s original staff. Su Ziceng fully expected that after her promotion to secretary-general of the Su family, all household matters would be handed over to a new housekeeper. It wasn’t until after her careful observation that she noticed something was amiss. It was already November, and knowing that Yang Wuxu liked spicy food, Su Ziceng had originally instructed the kitchen to prepare some stronger-tasting dishes. However, upon inquiry, she learned that Secretary Chang had given instructions. The old master was getting on in years, and since the rest of the family were women, it was preferable to maintain a light diet, leading to the preparation of some simple home-cooked dishes from the South. This left Su Ziceng speechless. Looking around at the household staff, it wasn’t just Uncle Zhong; only the head chef and the gardener hadn’t been replaced; all the others were new faces, including the maid cleaning her room. A bit displeased, Su Ziceng could only take Yang Wuxu out to select a dress for the upcoming Shengshi Huasha completion banquet. As soon as they entered Su Ziceng’s room, which was easily sixty or seventy square meters, all of Yang Wuxu’s attention was captured by Su Ziceng’s dressing room and shoe cabinet. Su Ziceng’s dressing room was more spacious than their dormitory at Kelly Women’s College, filled with various styles of designer clothes, organized and hung according to color and style. Some of her preferred styles even came in several different colors. Next to the door of the dressing room was a real-time updated list of clothes and accessories to facilitate Su Ziceng in putting together her outfits. All the clothes hanging here were still the lightweight dresses from before winter; bulkier clothes were stored in a special wardrobe room, periodically cleaned and ironed. What surprised Yang Wuxu the most was Su Ziceng’s shoe cabinet, which even came with a remote control. When she pressed the buttons on it, the cabinet’s twenty-something layers, like a Ferris wheel, started to turn, bringing each layer of different shoes directly in front of the selector for easy picking. Yang Wuxu roughly counted and figured there were at least two to three hundred pairs of shoes in the shoe cabinet alone. From stiletto heels to comfortable flats, enchanting Roland purple, generous crab-shell green, and always tasteful black and white, Su Ziceng’s dressing room and shoe cabinet were like a miniature museum—dazzling and overwhelming, leaving one at a loss for where to begin. "You can choose shoes from rows one to fifteen; those have never been worn," Su Ziceng said. Even though she owned an impressively large dressing room and shoe closet, she had never had the chance to show anyone around. "Why are these clothes so different from your current dressing style at school?" Kelly Women’s School doesn’t enforce a uniform policy, and apart from Yang Wuxu with her special circumstances, most female students preferred casual clothes, competing in fashion. Yang Wuxu had even secretly worn some of the clothes Su Ziceng left at Kelly Women’s College. Although they were also designer brands, in terms of color and style, they were completely different from those in the dressing room. How could the same person undergo such a drastic change in style and taste in such a short time?