By LAINEY NOGA
Long ago, in a world untouched by the erosion of decorum, Gouda-locks, a young pastry chef, journeyed to Paris with a dream of mastering the art of the éclair. After wandering the cobbled streets of Montmartre and tracing the banks of the Seine, she found the perfect fine-dining establishment and snuck inside the kitchen. For a while, she hid, captivated by the choreography of cutlery and chaos. But, unable to resist, Gouda-locks finally stepped forward, determined to fix the scrawny new plongeur’s disastrous pot of soup.
The salvaged soup was a hit, and Mouse, the head chef, hired Gouda-locks on the spot. Some might say it was the faint whiff of cheese coming from her ponytail, but she liked to think that the four years she spent earning her American undergraduate degree in Communications gave her a bit of an international edge when it came to high-class customer-service.
In the early days, before she succumbed to the weight of sugar-coated stress, Gouda-locks was always eager to conquer a new napoleon or construct a new paris-brest. Thus came Gouda to grip the udders of Cow. At a farm about thirty miles south, she ensured the milk for her pâte à choux was harvested responsibly. She chased the free-spirited Chicken around her range, certain it would improve the quality of the yolks for her crème pâtissière. She loved to spread that – if you can believe it! – her hand-churned butter made her chocolate glaze really shine. Alive was Gouda-locks with ambition, yet when she served her delicacies to Fox or Owl or Deer, they turned up their noses and requested something way much less caloric and a very lot more avant-garde.
Gouda-locks tried to keep her cool when Rabbit requested that her candied carrot cake be puréed and served in a shot glass to avoid disrupting her juice cleanse, and when Monkey insisted that the bananas in his brûléed banana balls were unethically sourced from an authoritarian republic. But the final straw came when Duck – eager to assert her sophistication before even placing her dinner order – performed a dramatic drumroll using her breadsticks as drumsticks on her bread roll before promptly sending her untouched gourmet bread basket back to the kitchen. Enough was enough!
So Gouda-locks hung up her apron and returned to the only place that truly felt like home back in her college days – the Applebee’s of Hadley, Massachusetts.
Though the menu baffled the Dutch girl with its fried jumbo shrimp and its barbeque boneless ribs, Gouda-locks rose at dawn every morning to brew a large cup of bittersweet coffee topped with her favorite non-dairy creamer, determined to conquer her new realm of Triple Chocolate Meltdowns. And, though she risked rebuke from HR – or worse, Bee himself – Gouda continued to make éclairs.
At the beginning, before she swallowed the bitter pill of defeat, Gouda-locks piped stealthy lines of dough onto industrial baking sheets, rekindling her passion for pastry with an almost manic determination. Gone were those pretensions of grandeur, now replaced by the buzz of sleep-deprived twenty-year-olds, their voracious appetites compensating for the underdevelopment of their frontal lobes. Gouda baked and baked – yet, somehow, she garnered the proper respect of no one. Indeed, those ungrateful undergrads didn’t even know how much they didn’t know about the epicurean marvel that is the French éclair. Shame!
After just a few weeks, Gouda-locks started imagining herself dying in terrible pain on the vinyl floor of this humdrum establishment. But her breaking point came when she asked for the day off on Thanksgiving, and her boss suggested she buy a frozen turkey dinner. Gouda-locks found this to be abysmally rude. If she was to take Turkey out to dinner, of course she would invite him inside her house and let him warm up a little first.
So, after knocking back a couple of official Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson margaritas for a dose of liquid courage, Gouda-locks quit. Western Massachusetts simply wasn’t ready for her craft. Too high-concept, she assumed.
That night, Gouda-locks decided it was time to unleash the big guns. She hungered for cultural exploration, an authentically diverse global adventure, a futuristic vision of humanity’s never-ending progress. Even more, she longed to bake her éclairs for customers who found magic in each bite, who never outgrew the childlike happiness of indulging in a good ol’ sweet treat. She wanted – no, she needed – the whole world.
So Gouda-locks booked a one-way ticket to Orlando.
On her first day of work at the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, as the sun rose over Cinderella’s castle, Gouda-locks dressed herself with a heavy heart, worried that her éclairs might go forever unappreciated and that no one would ever love her. But the moment her eyes fell on that breathtaking gray geodesic sphere, she felt the international essence of EPCOT resonate deep within her soul, and her zest for life returned with vengeance.
Yes, shortly thereafter, Gouda-locks was living the dream. Patrons rushed her éclair stand, a constant line wrapping around the near-identical replica of the Eiffel Tower. Wire racks – the kind Gouda-locks had hurled against the wall in a fit of rage just days before – now stood proudly, piled high with her sacred creations. This dessert which she loved more than her own life was now joyously chomped on by Hippo and snapped at by Crocodile, scooped up in the paws of Bear and stuffed into the bulging cheeks of Chipmunk.
A big cheesy smile spread across Gouda’s face and refused to melt away. It was paradise, making up for all the tribulations that had tormented the tumultuous history of her culinary career, when she often wept quietly in the walk-in refrigerators when no one was watching. Now Gouda-locks found purpose every day. She saw a future where she need never martyr her dignity for the glory of an éclair again.
And it was just right!
Writer | Lainey Noga ’26 | enoga26@amherst.edu
Editor | Sofia Ahmed Seid ’26 | sseid26@amherst.edu