After much inquiry, I had confirmed that girls were made, as suspected, of "sugar and spice and everything nice;" the rhyme was, in fact, factual.

The real issue was in the specifics, I found.  Sugar was a fairly straight-forward ingredient, at first glance, but there were many different kinds and refinements of the chemical.  For a while, I'd been assuming that market-bought sucrose would do the trick, but a part of me suspected I was oversimplifying the matter, given the product.  'Spice' was an even vaguer term, including everything from curry powder to basil leaves.  My experiments had already forced me to go through three whole spice racks.

But the biggest monster of all was the phrase, "everything nice."  I checked every philosphocal work from Socrates to Kant to Nietzsche, and none of them were helpful in the slightest.  In the end, I decided to start from scratch.  Electing to go with trial and error, I found every sweet-smelling flower, adorable-looking animal, and soft-feeling pillow I could get my hands on and threw them all together.  This of course solved nothing, and I was merely left with a very spicy and sweetened collection of nice things.  Something was missing.

Scientific ethics prevented me from simply dissecting an existing girl to discover the secret of 'nice,' and common sense told me that such an exploratory would yield no useful results.  However, this line of thought did lead me to an interesting epiphany:  girls were nice.  They were part of the recipe.  The only question was how exactly to include a product in its own creation.  Recursion didn't seem readily applicable to tangible alchemy.  Was it precise enough to say that a girl consisted of herself, thus including the remaining nice thing?  Was it necessary to expend one girl to create another?  In either case, what extension of the principle could explain the growing girl population?

The answer soon followed, by virtue of intuition.  Girls are born, made of their parents, including their mothers, who are themselves the most experienced girls.  I'd been using up cajun peppers and sugar cane needlessly for weeks when all I really needed was some respect for the true masters.