Affogato comes from a village that's just kinda in the wilderness of the Dark Cacao Kingdom. Crunchy Chip lives in the wilderness of that kingdom so I'm gonna say he always has lived there. So they'd basically be neighbors as kids and they ended up being besties. Affogato wasn't a bad kid and he just had a lot of ambition regarding being of help to the kingdom, probably partly influenced by Crunchy Chip's love for it. Affogato's also canonically treated as an outcast by others in the kingdom bc he's both coffee and milk, so he never felt like he belonged either in the coffee tribe or the milk tribe in the kingdom. So like Crunchy Chip is the only cookie who didn't see that as something to judge in him

As they become teens, Affogato starts to realize just what the issues are in the kingdom and what could be changed, but he hasn't gotten to the point of wanting to usurp the throne yet. It discomforts Crunchy Chip a bit how Affogato is starting to point out flaws in how the kingdom is run because Crunchy Chip was so much loyalty to the kingdom and Dark Cacao. So he tries to stick around and get Affogato to see it's not as bad as he thinks

Affogato leaves the kingdom and travels to different places as soon as he's old enough to and tries to find a better place to belong than the Dark Cacao Kingdom and learns more about magic and perfects it and all that. After seeing how different places are ruled, he takes notes and figures out ways he could rule a kingdom better than Dark Cacao. So he comes back to the Dark Cacao kingdom with the goal of at least influencing things to be better. So yeah he comes back and manipulates everyone to try climbing his way up