This episode picks up with Rumi and Kana confronting the other group of girls about the theft of the cake design, but this doesn’t lead anywhere. Outside the school, Kana is in tears because her sister Ringo might be upset over the cake theft but Rumi tells her to look at Ichigo and the princes working hard on something.

       Back inside the kitchen, Ichigo tells the princes that she has a even better cake design, but she has no time to explain. So, Ichigo asks the princes to just help her out and she’ll explain as they go along,  the boys are all in. Ichigo says this is a race against time, and everyone helps out, even the sweet spirits. Ichigo thanks everyone for believing her, and Hanabusa says that only Ichigo could have come up with such a strange cake design so it had to have been hers. Once everything is finished, Ichigo asks the spirits for their help and she tells Ringo to hold on.

      Inside Ringo’s classroom we see that she’s very nervous because one of the boys is teasing her about her birthday cake. Back at St. Marie’s we see that the other group is planning a nasty surprise by telling the teacher that group A is OK and they have the school van leave without them. Kana and Rumi both witnessed this nasty bit and Kana runs off to do something. When group A arrives outside the school they see that the bus is missing and there’s no way they’ll make it to the school on time, so Ichigo asks Vanilla if she could use magic to get them to Ringo’s school, but alas, she says it’s impossible.

      A minute later Kana shows up with  a van and we find out that Kana stopped the first van that happened by the school and begged for a ride to Ringo’s school. Well, the man doesn’t know the situation, but felt sorry for Kana because she’s so upset, so he agrees to give them a ride.

       Meanwhile at Ringo’s school, the kids are getting impatient, so the other group presents Ayu’s with her birthday cake. Ringo is starting to get grief from the other kids and she really starting to worry when Ichigo’s group arrives on the scene.  As Ichigo’s group is about to present the cake to Ringo the other girls think that there’s no way they could have made something good in so little time. Well, when Ichigo lifts the lid, Ringo and the whole class is amazed by the creation. The group has created a candy witch house with a little Ringo trapped inside and her class has to rescue her from the witch.

      Once the witch is defeated, Ichigo lifts the house’s lid revealing a little Ringo who has baked a cake for her classmates. Well, in all the excitement over Ringo’s cake, poor Ayu-chan is left sitting alone with her cake. After Ringo thanks her classmates for defeating the witch she asks them if they could move her cake to where Ayu-chan is sitting so they can all play together. When the whole class is sitting together, it looks like Ringo has made friends with Ayu-chan, and the princes comment on how this was Ichigo’s idea from the very beginning.

       As the whole class is devouring the cake, Kana runs over to Ichigo and hugs her saying that this is the first time she’s seen her sister smile since they moved here. Rumi then comes over and tells the girls to quit being so formal now that they’re buddies, and they both agree to stop calling each other by last names and agree to use Kana-chan and Ichigo-chan from now on.

       Later, the princes tell Ichigo that Ringo must really be happy, and a tearful Ichigo tells them that for the first time she’s discovered the joy in bringing happiness to others. Ichigo tells them that she remembers the smile that her grandmother wore as she watched Ichigo enjoy her sweets.

       Later, as the group is walking back to school, Ichigo thanks the sweets spirits and the boys for all their help and rushes off to the kitchen to start the prep work for a group practice session. The boys talk about how Ichigo just experienced the joy of making others happy and they comment on how Ichigo seems to know what other people need. Hanabusa asks Kashino if he’s scared of Ichigo’s nature and rapidly improving skills? No, Kashino says he looks forward to seeing what kind of new sweets Ichigo will create. Well, that’s all the sweets for this episode.

      Well, this was one awesome episode during which Ichigo showcased the best traits of a shoujo heroine. As the old poem goes.

What are little girls made of?
Sugar and spice
And everything nice.

       While Ichigo may be all of that, she’s also has a never up give and work hard attitude. But, I think that Hanabusa might have grasped Ichigo’s best trait, empathy. Ichigo has the ability to use her personal experiences to be able to place herself in the other person’s shoes and understand their emotional distress. Ichigo was able to connect with Andou’s brother’s feelings of being left behind and Ichigo was able to understand the loneliness that Ringo was experiencing at her new school, so this ability of Ichigo enables her to actually fix the situation instead of just feeling sorry for the person. This ability of Ichigo is were she she closely resembles a magic girl. In the magic girl genre, words may lie, and your vision may try to fool you, but the heart is always true and if you follow your heart you can’t go wrong. 

         Also, when are all those jealous girls in shoujo anime and manga gonna realise all that scheming and conniving never wins over the nice boys? Yes, I’m talking to the devious and cruel girls from Kimi ni Todoke, Yumeiro, and all the others of their ilk, NO CAKE FOR YOU.

For a little essay on the diffrences between empathy vs sympathy click here.