The Baking Life of Amelie Day

by Vanessa Curtis

  If you’ve found this website it might be because you’ve Googled the work ‘cake’ or the word ‘bake’, or maybe you’re just nosing around on the internet and have found me by accident. Anyway, welcome to the first blog posting of Amelie Day, wannabee Champion Baker and future author of The Amelie Day Book of Baking. I’ve been chosen as a quarter-finalist in Britain’s Best Teen Baker and I’ll be appearing on a television screen near you in the not-too-distant future. I live with my Mum but not my Dad. They split up when I was two but they’re still friends, or so they say. Mum is a big fan of my baking, for various reasons which I’m not going to list here ‘cos they’re boring and my whole life is too full of them anyway. But all you need to know is that I bake. I love baking. It’s my life. Flour Power! Oh, and I need your recipes, especially if you know how to make any really awesome and unusual biscuits. So if you’ve got any you don’t mind sharing with me, please post them here.

  I stand back and read my first blog posting. Then I read it again with my mouth full of chocolate. I keep emergency rations in my schoolbag and in my desk drawer at home. Most kids are told not to stuff themselves with junk all the time, but I’m not most kids and my mum doesn’t mind.

  Besides, my chocolate is really good quality. I don’t buy so much of the rubbish sugary milky stuff that other kids are addicted to, although from time to time it’s the only thing that will do when I’m desperate for a quick pick-me-up sugar/calorie fest.

  I watched a programme about how real, decent chocolate comes from the best quality cacao beans and I persuaded Karim to order a few bars of the dark stuff for his shop, knowing full well that the other customers wouldn’t go near it. He ended up with the bars leftover unsold, so guess what? He passed them straight to me as part of my ‘wages’.

  I’ve got some left in my emergency stash drawer. I slide it out of the pale silver wrapper and enjoy the snapping sound that it makes when I break it. I read in a cookbook once that this is a sign of really good chocolate. Then I sniff the rich smell of the beans. It’s a sharp smell, a bit like lemons. I put one precious square onto my tongue and allow it to melt without sucking. It zings into my mouth and seems to wake up my brain. I sit back in my chair with a big sigh and enjoy the sensation. When it’s gone, I don’t replace it. Sometimes a little bit is loads more delicious than a lot.

  I only learned that quite recently. It kind of goes against everything that Mum is telling me to do all the time, but I reckon that the odd day where I don’t over-eat is probably not going to do me much more harm than has already been done.

  I log off from my computer and go downstairs to see what Mum is making for dinner.

  ***

  ‘You’ll need some new clothes,’ Mum says.

  We’re eating Shepherd’s Pie together at the kitchen table with the doors thrown open onto the courtyard outside. Our house used to be part of an old stable for a grand estate. The grand house has long since gone, but the stable buildings were converted into houses years ago and we live on the very end of the block. Next to our house is a huge arch where the horses and carriages used to pass through into the back of the grand estate, but nowadays cars drive through it to park outside their houses instead. If you look closely up at the arch you can still see hinges where the grand gates once were and our house is full of beams with old nails hammered through them for holding horse tack and harnesses. It’s what Mum calls a ‘character property’ when she’s describing it to people she doesn’t know. It’s damp in winter, has low ceilings and tons of leaks, but the brilliant thing is that it’s got an enormous kitchen made up of three rooms knocked through into one. There’s a cooking station in the middle with stools around the outside where we eat meals, do homework or in my case, bake myself into oblivion.

  Mum got the house when she and Dad got divorced. Dad came from a rich family, so he was generous when they split up and even came round house-hunting with her until she laid eyes upon the run-down stable conversion where we now live. He paid her extra to have it done up and we’ve been here for eleven years.

  I love our house, but most of all I love the kitchen.

  That’s where my heart belongs.

  That’s where I truly feel at home.

  ‘I don’t need any more clothes, Mum,’ I say.

  My mind isn’t on clothes tonight. Or any night, come to think of it.

  I just logged onto my blog and already there are two recipes on there from complete strangers who’ve found it. One of them, from a girl called Jane, is for chocolate chip and peanut cookies. My eyes light up and I print off her recipe and I’m trying to read it downstairs, but Mum keeps interrupting me.

  ‘Yes, but don’t you want to look nice on the television?’ asks Mum. She glances at my purple leggings and white t-shirt with a giant picture of a purple cupcake in the middle of it. ‘You look lovely when you make the effort, Amelie.’

  She comes over to where I’m sitting, forking up carrots and mince, and pulls my hair back onto the damp nape of my neck.

  ‘I wish you’d wear your hair up instead of in this bird’s nest,’ she says, releasing it back into its usual scruffy position. ‘You have a fabulous profile. Like a French actress or something.’

  I bat her away with my hands. ‘Mum,’ I say. ‘I’m so not in the mood. It’s more important that I actually know what I’m going to cook for this competition, isn’t it?’

  Mum sighs and loads empty plates into the dishwasher.

  ‘Well, I’m going to take you shopping at the weekend,’ she says. ‘No argument. I got paid a little bonus last week and I think we both deserve a treat.’

  ‘OK, OK,’ I say. ‘Whatever. And now I need to go and experiment with golden syrup, if that’s alright with you?’

  Mum turns round with a plate in her hand.

  ‘Amelie,’ she says. ‘We need to talk about how we’re actually going to manage this trip to London. I mean – it’s going to be tough on you.’

  It’s on the tip of my tongue to be rude, because I hate it when she makes a fuss. I guess I know that it all comes from years of caring and worrying about me, so I bite my tongue and go over to the kitchen cupboard where I’ve labelled the door ‘AMELIE’S STUFF’.

  I stare at all the lovely rows of tins and jars and bottles and packets, but my eyes appear to have misted over or got tired or something, because for a moment I can’t see.

  Then the mist clears.

  I grab a tin of golden syrup and prise open the lid with the end of a teaspoon.

  I spend the rest of the evening trying not to think about what Mum just said.

  Chapter Three

  We hit town on Saturday. I’ve brought Gemma with for moral support. Mum tends to get a bit carried away when confronted with the joy of frocks and shoes. Mind you, Gemma loves that sort of thing as well, so I’m not expecting much help from her either.

  Mum heads into the very first clothes shop that we come across.

  ‘I don’t even LIKE their stuff,’ I groan, but Mum has developed her usual selective deafness and is throwing armfuls of dresses over her arm and rifling through racks and shelves with a determined frown on her face.

  ‘This would be a lovely colour on you, Gemma,’ she says, holding up a pale yellow strappy dress in thin cotton against Gemma’s pink skin and blonde hair. ‘Wouldn’t suit Amelie though. She needs bolder colour against her dark hair.’

  ‘Actually, Mrs Day, I really love that,’ says Gemma, spinning round and holding the dress up against her in front of the mirror. ‘But Mum hasn’t actually given me my pocket money yet, so…’

  She affects a sad look and puts the dress back on the rail. Gemma knows how to play my mother like a pack of cards. She comes from a single-parent family, just like me, but her mother only has a small job in a supermarket and there isn’t much money left for clothes. Gemma and her mum always come to us for Christmas dinner every year so that Mum can make a big fuss of them and show off her huge kitchen all at the same time.

  It’s
worked, as usual.

  ‘Oh Gemma,’ says Mum, putting an arm around my best friend. ‘If you love it, then you shall have it! I got a bonus last week.’

  She gives Gemma a note and gestures at her to go and pay for the dress. I swear that my friend actually SKIPS to the cash till.

  I shudder and give Mum my disapproving look, but I can’t help smiling. She’s a cool mum, most of the time.

  When she’s not fussing over me, that is.

  ‘And what about a dress for you?’ Mum is saying. ‘Come on! You might get through to the final, you never know! Then there will be millions of people watching your every move on television.’

  When she says this, I get a butterfly thrill in my stomach. That leads me to think about butterfly cakes, the ones with the little sponge wings that you place on top in the buttercream. I’m so wrapped up in thinking about whether I could incorporate blueberry syrup that I don’t even really notice when Mum shoves an armful of dresses onto me and pushes me into a changing room.

  The dresses are all vile. I hate dresses anyway. Although I’ve got long dark hair and a girly sort of face, I’m not really into pretty dressing. I like leggings, jeans, boots and denim or leather jackets best of all.

  In the end I reach a compromise with Mum and I agree on a sleeveless tunic with a grey and white pattern on it and some cropped black leggings and a pair of black ballerinas. It all kind of goes with my hair and colouring, so she’s happy enough and I can’t wait to get out of the shop and go home.

  I’m starting to feel a bit weird.

  I glance in the mirror as we leave the shop with our parcels. My skin has gone sort of grey with a slight bluish tinge. I try to walk ahead of Mum so that she doesn’t notice, but Mum is trained in the art of monitoring my health at all times and she has some sort of psychic radar which now causes her to catch me up and stare straight into my face.

  ‘You don’t look too good,’ she says, dropping her bags and putting both hands on my shoulders. ‘Surely you can’t be getting another infection? You’re on enough antibiotics to make you rattle!’

  My head starts to swim and my chest tightens up.

  ‘Uh-oh,’ says Gemma, who knows the signs almost as well as Mum does. ‘Should I get somebody?’

  Mum has ushered me back into the shop and pushed me into a chair. A concerned shop assistant hovers behind her. A crowd appears to be gathering. Wow. I must look really bad.

  ‘Inhaler,’ I choke. My mother reaches into her huge bag and pulls out a small plastic blue device and passes it to me. I take several deep puffs but it’s not enough to stop the cough coming.

  I bend over double and cough like I’m trying to cough my heart out of my body. Sometimes it feels as if I might actually succeed. That would be gross. Imagine coughing your heart out of your mouth. Ew.

  ‘Take it easy,’ Mum is saying. She’s crouching down in front of me now. Her tan has faded and her face looks all papery and old. ‘Gemma, could you get the water out of my bag, love?’

  Gemma passes over the bottle with a solemn look on her pale face. Her new yellow dress lies forgotten in its bag on the floor.

  I gulp at the water and cough some more and then at last the choked-up feeling in my chest subsides a bit as the inhaler kicks in and does its work.

  ‘Wow,’ I say, wiping my eyes. ‘I felt fine when we got here.’

  ‘Hmm,’ says my mother, pushing my hair back off my face. ‘I’m really not sure that we should even be thinking about going to London for this competition, Amelie. A week spent in Central London with the pollution and everything in the middle of summer. No – it’s a crazy idea. I think I’m going to have to go back on what I said. We can’t go to London, and that’s that.’

  My eyes are watering again as we walk in silence out of the shop. This time it’s not the coughing that’s done it, but the sinking feelings of gloom and disappointment that are threatening to engulf me.

  Mum opens the car doors in silence. Gemma slides in next to me on the back seat and gives me sympathetic looks but she doesn’t dare speak. She fingers the plastic bag with her dress in. I can tell that she’s dying to look inside but doesn’t want to appear uncaring.

  I spend the journey home with my head buried in my hands.

  I hate this stupid illness and what it does to my life.

  Oh. I didn’t explain, did I? What’s wrong with me, I mean.

  I suffer from an illness called Cystic Fibrosis.

  There is no cure for it at the moment.

  This basically means, I’m going to die.

  Chapter Four

  When I say I’m going to die, I don’t mean right away.

  Lots of people with Cystic Fibrosis now go on into adulthood. I met somebody at the hospital who was nearly forty and to me that seemed pretty ancient, so I was impressed.

  I’ve had the illness since I was born. You get it if both your parents carry a faulty gene and it looks like mine did. I know that Mum still blames herself whenever I get more unwell which is stupid really, because I don’t blame her and how could she have known about carrying the faulty gene? I got diagnosed before my first birthday after Mum noticed that whenever she kissed me, she could taste salt. People with CF produce more salt when they sweat. So they gave me the sweat test and told Mum that I had the illness.

  Having Cystic Fibrosis means that there are two big problems I have to live with on a daily basis.

  The first is that my lungs fill up with mucus and I feel like I’m going to choke. I have ways of treating this at home or in hospital, but it takes up masses of time and that’s a right pain. The other frustrating thing is that my digestive system doesn’t work as well as it should do and I can’t digest my food properly. I have to take special capsules called enzymes with every single meal I eat, otherwise I get a vile stomach ache and might throw up.

  There are upsides of having Cystic Fibrosis though. I’m allowed to stuff my face! So for lunch I can have cheese sandwiches and crisps and a thick milkshake and that’s just for starters. I snack throughout the day on crisps and biscuits and the teachers make an exception for me because they know if I don’t eat enough I’ll keel over and then my mother will come rampaging down to the school and have a go at them.

  The weird thing is that even though I eat masses of crap and I’m underweight, my skin is clear and glowing. Gemma gets really annoyed about that. She eats salad for lunch every day and gulps juice but she’s got masses of spots.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ she says. ‘You practically LIVE off cake. How come your complexion is so good?’

  I smile and look superior whenever she says this. Well – with Cystic Fibrosis you have to take all the compliments you can, whenever you can get them.

  I struggle to keep looking good. It’s one of the things about CF that I really hate. Yeah, I can eat whatever I like whenever I like, but the downside is that despite all that, I’m still really underweight and bony. I’m quite short, too, as CF stops you growing to the same height as everybody else.

  Gemma reckons I’m pretty, though.

  ‘Your hair is to die for,’ she said once. Unfortunate words to use, but I laughed anyway. My hair is almost black and very long and shiny. ‘And you’ve got a heart-shaped face.’

  It’s true. I do have an OK sort of face. It’s just my body that lets me down.

  For all the things going wrong inside of me I take tablets. Hundreds and hundreds of them. Some of my medicine is inhaled from the nebuliser, but much more of it comes in the form of tablets.

  Every morning Mum hands me a box with the days of the week written on little plastic compartments and I open my mouth and gulp down a handful of tablets with a glass of water. This is what I take:

  Tablets to open my airways up.

  Tablets to stop acid coming up from my stomach and burning my throat.

  Multivitamins to keep my general health levels as high as possible.

  Tablets to help my body break down fats.

  Tablets to help me
breathe easier through my sinuses.

  Vitamin K for bone strength.

  Antibiotics to stop chest infections.

  I take all of these more than once a day. Mum counted them up and told me that I take seventy-five pills every single day.

  So.

  As luck would have it, my growing up with Cystic Fibrosis started to coincide with my love of baking, and seeing as how I need to get in at least 3000 calories per day, it seems like the perfect career to be aiming for. Even Mum can’t really argue with that. I reckon she secretly wanted me to train to be something like an accountant and earn loads of money, but now I’m on the path to world cake domination she’s wise enough to see that she can’t really stop me.

  Nothing and nobody can get in the way of my ambition now.

  I’m determined to get to London, whatever Mum says.

  I’m going to bake my way to the top.

  Flour Power!

  You might think that people with Cystic Fibrosis can’t really make proper relationships.

  You’d be wrong.

  Harry’s really cool about the whole thing.

  I’ve had it all the time I’ve known him, which is ages. But when we started going out I reminded him that life with a CF patient isn’t exactly fun.

  ‘I hang out at hospitals a lot,’ I said. ‘If you’re looking for a bouncy person with lots of breath, you’d be better off asking Gemma out instead.’

  There.

  I gave him every chance to back off and run away in horror from the crazy sick girl with the bag full of cake and the ribcage which poked through her t-shirt.

  Instead he reached out and took my hand.

  I was so surprised that I lost the power of speech.

  Not for long though.

  ‘Did you hear what I said?’ I said. ‘I’m not always a lot of fun.’