There was a flurry of activity as everyone started going through their books for the recipe and then made a dash for the store cupboard.
Paige took her time, thumbing through one of her own books rather than just using the school-recommended book. She also used it as an opportunity to scrutinise the boy moodily perched on a stool next to her.
He was flicking the pages of his textbook as if the contents were somehow going to infect him; in fact he looked at the cake section as if each picture disgusted him on a personal level.
Despite his cut to her earlier, Paige took pity on him. “Page 42,” she said, leaning over to find it for him. “Do you want me to help you?”
“No. It’s just a stupid cake, right? How hard can it be?” He snatched his book back from her and began to read the recipe.
Paige smiled, finding his attitude more amusing than offensive. He’d find out soon enough. A Victoria sponge always looked easy but it was an absolute pain to get just right.
She jotted some notes on her pad and then made her way to the storeroom. Toby followed at a distance, trying not to look like he was copying her.
He determinedly picked out the recommended ingredients, ignoring what she was selecting, and took the pile back to his workstation before she was done.
Feeling quite proud of himself, he found two cake tins in the cupboard underneath the cooker, and then came to a standstill. What did it mean when it said to grease the cake tins? Grease them with what? Olive oil? Duck fat? Car grease?
He glanced discreetly at Paige to see what she was doing. Aha, she was greasing it with butter. He surreptitiously copied her method then went back to his book to see what to do next. He weighed out the rest of the ingredients meticulously and then sifted the flour as instructed. He was a little overzealous with the sifting, and an awful lot of the flour ended up on his clothes as well as in the bowl, so he tipped in an extra handful to be sure. Using the electric whisk was the high point for Toby. He liked how powerful it felt, and enjoyed taking his humiliation out on the cake mix. He was sure it was no big deal that a large amount of it lapped the edge of the bowl and was stirred back in at the end a tad lumpy; it would just add texture.
Shoving it in the oven, Toby felt nothing but loathing for his cake. How embarrassing if any of his football mates saw him now. Was there anything more girly than putting a cake in the oven?
Twenty-two minutes later Paige went to get hers out. Toby watched her suspiciously. He had set his timer for exactly twenty-five minutes as instructed, but she had ignored hers.
He surreptitiously sniffed as she lifted out her two cakes and put them on a rack to cool. They looked perfect and they smelt absolutely delicious. His nose drew him a little closer. He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply.
Beside him Paige smiled happily, noting his reaction.
“It’s rosewater,” she whispered.
“What?” His eyes snapped open.
“I added a few drops of rosewater.”
Toby had just opened his mouth to tell her exactly how little he cared, when his oven timer went off. He stomped over to the oven and grabbed his cakes, then he checked them. Just as he had suspected, they didn’t look like Paige’s. Where hers were fluffy, his looked dry. He turned them out on the rack and glowered at them until they cooled down. He roughly slapped on the cream and the jam, building the cake, then endured the pain of lightly dusting them with icing sugar. No one must ever find out, he swore to himself.
Mrs Meadows moved around the classroom checking the cakes and making remarks on them.
When she reached their bench she stopped first at Paige’s station. Toby rolled his eyes as Mrs Meadows went into raptures over Paige’s presentation, and then again when she asked if she could try a tiny bit.
“You’ve been cheating again, haven’t you, Paige?” Mrs Meadows said sternly.
Toby hid his grin. Was Little Miss Perfect about to get told off?
But Paige was looking pleased, not chastised. “Yes, Mrs Meadows,” she confirmed.
“What is it? Lavender? No, rosewater!” Mrs Meadows was suddenly all smiles again. “Very inspired, Paige, just the right amount as well – good work.”
She moved on to Toby. She didn’t ask to taste his cake; instead she looked at it like it was an unexploded bomb. “It’s a very credible first try, Toby, well done,” she said with a grimace before moving on.
At the end of the lesson everyone boxed their cakes in plastic containers to take away, but Toby chucked his into the bin instead.
Paige put her hand on his arm. “You didn’t even taste it. I’m sure it would have been lovely.”
Toby shook off her hand. He’d already had as much as he could take from Perfect Paige without being patronised as well. He hefted his rucksack on his shoulder and left without responding to her.
In reality he knew that his cake had not been that bad really. A few lumps on the top and a bit of a brown colour under the icing sugar was the worst of it. But while he thought his mother might have been impressed with the cake, just because he had actually made it, he also knew his sister would have a field day teasing him about it if she ever found out, so it was better not to open that particular can of worms at all.
He stepped out into the sunshine, hugely relieved to be out of the Home Economics classroom before anyone relevant saw him in there. He cracked the tension out of his neck and rolled his shoulders.
No way. There was simply no way he could do this course. Making cakes was definitely not his thing. He would go and speak to Miss Chumworth again – surely there had to be something else?
Chapter Nineteen
AFTER SCHOOL DINNER that night, Paige went back to her dorm room in South Tower and went straight to her desk. She lifted the lid on the box containing her cake and took another deep sniff of the contents. Her mother had loved to bake, and had been employed making cupcakes for a local deli/café, before giving it up to help her father with his rapidly expanding business. Paige felt like she had grown up in the kitchen watching her mother at work. As a little girl her best memories were of stirring cake mixes and then licking the spoon. Those experiences had shaped what Paige wanted to do with her life. Her father ran a publishing business, which had recently grown to be a large global company, and she had learned a lot about publishing before she had left home for boarding school. She now intended to take the best of both of her parents’ jobs and combine them. She wanted to write a cookbook and get it published, and she wanted to run her own business making wedding cakes. With her future plans in mind, she had chosen her A-levels carefully. As well as Home Economics, she had enrolled to study English Language, Art, and Business Studies. The Home Ec class would hopefully give her the skills she needed to make wedding cakes and do the costing of ingredients and so on. The English was to help her write her book, Art to improve her design skills for the more fancy cakes, and the Business Studies to help her with setting up and running her own business. She wasn’t even sure she wanted to do any further education. Her father was determined that she should get a degree, but what would college teach her that she didn’t already know or could learn at school? She just wanted to throw herself into having her own business and get on with it.
Reaching into the bottom drawer of her desk Paige got out her mother’s old cookbook.
The cookbook was her most treasured possession. It was really just a large ring binder file that her mother had kept recipes in, but over the years both she and Paige had added to it until it was overflowing with cuttings from magazines, photographs and drawings of dishes and cakes, and handwritten recipes of their own design.
Paige flicked through it until she found the Victoria sponge page and wrote in the margin: 3 drops of rosewater per cake.
When she’d finished her prep work, she lay on her bed and grabbed her sketch pad. She’d seen a beautiful red butterfly in the playground after lunch and it had given her an idea.
An hour later the bed was littered with pictures of butterflies of
all different colours, each one sitting on top of a cupcake. It was a butterfly cupcake-wedding cake. Paige was itching to try and make it, maybe she would be able to make use of Kitchen Two in the Home Economics department during her free period the next day.
As she lay awake in the darkness, she pondered for the first time how unlikely it was that Toby Falcon was in her Home Ec class.
What on earth was he doing there? She didn’t really know Toby; even though they were in the same year at school they had never really talked before. They had completely different friends and different interests. They had simply never crossed paths until now.
She was a girl’s girl. She had some female friends, and she’d had one boyfriend, Tom, whom she’d dated for almost a year before his family moved away and he’d left Compass Court. But other than that she didn’t really have any male friends. Not that she could see herself and Toby becoming friends. He was cute, but kind of moody and bad-tempered. Plus, if she remembered rightly, then he was passionate about football, a sport which she loathed. And Beth Jenkins was his girlfriend. No, she would be pleasant as usual if he continued coming to class, but they would never be friends.
Chapter Twenty
ON FRIDAY AFTER SCHOOL, Toby collected a bag of footballs from the gym and set out for their usual practice session on the sports field. As he approached the edge of the pitch he saw Beth waiting for him.
He grinned at her, thinking how lucky he was to find a girlfriend who liked football as much as he did and didn’t get annoyed with him for playing it instead of spending time with her. Beth would rather be playing it herself.
As she hopped down from the wall to meet him he admired her athletic physique in her shorts, trainers and Renaldo football shirt. Her ponytail swung on the back of her head adding a little feminine charm to the outfit, but otherwise she was all about the game.
“Hey, handsome, are you avoiding me?” she teased with confidence, but he knew she was using the attitude to hide her insecurity.
“No, why?” He frowned like he didn’t know what she was talking about, but inwardly his heart sank that she had noticed. He was going to have to tell her, otherwise she might misread it as him pulling away.
“You disappeared on Thursday afternoon and then I didn’t see you at all on Friday, did you take lunch and dinner with the lower school?”
He sighed. “I wasn’t dodging you or anything – well, I sort of was, but only because I didn’t want you to laugh at me.”
“Why, what have you done?”
Toby ran his hand through his hair. “Promise me you won’t tell anyone?”
“Sure.”
“I mean it, Bethan. I will never forgive you if you say a word.”
“What is it?” She was starting to look genuinely alarmed.
“I spent last period on Thursday making a Victoria sponge cake.”
“No way – c’mon, I mean seriously? But why?” she asked as he nodded.
“I need four A-levels to get into Birmingham and no one has ever failed Home Ec.”
She burst out laughing, “You’re having me on! I know you were failing maths, but Home Ec? What were you thinking? It is so not you!”
“Exactly, so keep it quiet or the boys will go to town on it. But it does kind of make sense because I’ll be learning all about nutrition, which will be useful for my degree.”
“Uh huh, and just what is the nutritional content of a Victoria sponge cake?”
He elbowed her in the ribs for teasing him and then tugged playfully on her pony-tail. “Shut it, or I’ll tell everyone about your Spiderman bra.”
“Yeah, right, that really does not compare with an image of the manly Toby Falcon wearing a pinny and wielding a wooden spoon.”
He rolled his eyes and gave up. “Let’s go warm-up, who else is here?”
“Bryn and Joey are doing laps and Kelly’s gone for the water cooler. No one else yet.”
“Okay, cool.” He shaded his eyes against the setting sun and waved to the boys who were at the far end of the field, then he chucked his hoodie to Beth and ran to catch up with them.
PAIGE PUSHED THE LAST page of her Business Studies prep work away from her and pressed Save on the computer spread sheet. She had finally done it and now she deserved a reward. She left the library and walked around the building to the annex that housed the Home Ec department. Knocking on the door to the main Kitchen, Kitchen One, she got no answer and so walked on to Kitchen Two. It was in darkness and locked, but Paige had a key.
Kitchen Two was much smaller, and hardly ever used for lessons, but Mrs Meadows encouraged the keener students to use it to do Prep work and extra study, and Paige had not had a problem borrowing the key from her earlier that day.
Once inside, she put on an apron and took a mixing bowl out of the cupboard. She reached up and lifted her favourite pair of scales off the shelf. They were seriously heavy, made in the late 1800s of iron and brass, but she trusted the weights far more than any modern digital scale. She quickly whipped up a simple cupcake mix and set the cakes to bake, and then she tackled the really tough bit. Making edible butterflies to adorn each cake.
As well as a spice rack, the kitchen had a well stocked food colorants rack. Jars and jars of every colour imaginable lined the rack like an artist’s paint palette. It had all the standard colours plus some extras that had been sourced from special suppliers, like fuchsia, alizarin, silver and gold. She could also blend colours as she did now, creating three different pinks so she could make a realistic rose pattern of icing to rest her butterflies on.
The cupcakes only took twenty minutes and she soon had them cooling on a rack. Then she set about mixing up some frosting to make the butterflies. She worked butter and sugar together and added in some shortening and cream until she was completely happy that the texture could hold its shape, and then she began to experiment.
First she spread several cakes with coloured icing, some with a simple white background and others with icing that had started with the same white mix, but now had pink tones. She moulded these with a palette knife in intricate curves to give the pattern of a pink rose with vibrant tips, and practised until she was happy. After she had covered half a dozen cakes this way, she decided to tackle the butterflies.
The first set she modelled with her hands, and put the plain-coloured frosting mix onto each cake in the butterfly shape where it would harden within minutes.
The second set were much trickier. She added vibrant colours, plus a little pearl shimmer powder to give the butterfly effect, to her mixture, and then without blending the colours at all she put the mix into a piping bag and piped out several butterfly shapes. Each one came out with different colours, but Paige wasn’t happy with them. After all, the whole point of a butterfly was that the wings were symmetrical.
She tilted her head thoughtfully. It could possibly work with a piping bag if it were anything other than butterflies. But it was hard to control the colours that way. She would have to pipe out each colour individually, building it slowly. She made a few notes on her pad and then dug deep in her school bag for her art supplies.
Once she had decided the plain frosting butterfly shapes were stiff enough, she began to painstakingly paint each one using a fine-tipped brush and a little food colouring in cream. It took a while but she was thrilled with the results. She snapped several photos on her phone. Later she would link the phone to her printer and then stick the prints along with her sketches onto a new page in the cookbook binder.
Humming to herself, Paige put a few into a box to show them to Mrs Meadows, who would hopefully think they looked good enough to grace a wedding cake one day. The remaining cupcakes went into a Tupperware container to give to some of her friends in South Tower, and then she set about cleaning up the kitchen.
Chapter Twenty-one
IT WAS ONLY FOUR WEEKS since he’d switched from Maths to Home Economics but Toby felt close to pulling his hair out. He’d been told that Home Economics was going to be easy;
and maybe it was if you were a girl, but his personal feeling was that, as a boy, he shouldn’t have to be doing this stuff. He was the only boy in the entire class and also the only person who seemed to be spectacularly failing it.
It didn’t help that he had to sit next to Little Miss Perfect. With her shiny blonde hair, and her neat pink nails, and her permanent smile, she was basically an utter drip. He couldn’t decide if she was really as saccharine-sweet as she seemed, or if she were secretly a manipulative faker who had everybody fooled.
Paige had offered to help him several times, but he was extremely suspicious. He was convinced that she enjoyed watching him mess up all the time. Maybe that was why she was always smiling – it was just malicious glee.
He thumped the dough in front of him and then rolled it in a ball before smashing it back down on the counter.
“Wow, I wish I had the muscles to knead the bread like that,” Paige said beside him in an admiring tone of voice.
His lip curled. He was sure she was being sarcastic; perhaps she was amused by his anger. He detested girls like her. He was fairly sure that she was a traditionalist, a girl who expected a man to support her while she went shopping and to a spa for a facial. No wonder he never saw her in any of his other classes; there was no need for her to do any of the more serious subjects at school, she probably had no intention of going to University except maybe to catch a rich husband.
He knew he was being incredibly judgmental, but he had been raised by really hard-working career parents, who had given him and his sister great role models.
That was just another reason why Beth was so great. She was a breath of fresh air compared to girls like Paige Finchley. Beth knew what she wanted from life, she was going to be a veterinarian – and despite the difficulty of the course and the fact that she had to get all A stars in her exams to get her place at Veterinary College, he knew she would achieve it. Beth wasn’t a faker social butterfly; she preferred the quiet of the library to any party. She was clever and focussed, not to mention pretty, and best of all she was really into football. Now that was his definition of a perfect girl.
Boy Girl Games Page 8
