A Bake Off in Cornwall

by Laura Briggs

  There I go with that corny introduction again. You're not real, you’re just a diary, so I have to stop addressing you like you're a person.

  I had a dream last night that I was being attacked by gingerbread men. I think it was inspired by Dinah's sketches of her imposing gingerbread castle, which looks like something that gingerbread Game of Thrones characters would probably live in. Dinah is in the top five, so we're hoping to help her advance. Of course, I don't know anything about baking, but Gemma's been Dinah's assistant forever — and Kitty knows a thing or two, not that she's willing to admit it. I think she's forgotten how well I know Charlotte Jones.

  Then again, I think Kitty's always afraid that everybody knows about her past.

  — Julianne

  ***

  Kitty:

  "Any clue what you're doing?" I asked Nathan.

  "Of course," he said. "Relax. I've baked before."

  "Frozen dinner trays?"

  "No," he answered, sarcastically. "I used to help my grandma make gingerbread cookies." He paused. "Well, I used to help cut them out and put sprinkles on them, anyway. So practically baking, right?"

  He cracked a smile for his joke. I didn't, but only because I was too busy trying to get the edges just right as we cut little horses out of the sticky dough. When it got a bit warm, it tended to tear, so I was having to chill little rounds of it in between cutting. After my second horse tore in half, I wadded the rolled dough into a ball and swapped it once more.

  "Let me." Nathan rolled up his shirtsleeves and reached for the rolling pin. "We'll save your strong arm for after I'm worn out."

  "Right."

  "You can talk to me, you know," he said. "I don't bite. I know you do, but I'm willing to put up with that."

  The teeniest edge of a smile now. I couldn't help it, really. "I don't bite," I said. "I just don't have much patience with prats. There's always plenty of them about. I guess I tend to think of everyone that way. Not exactly fair, I know."

  He didn't say anything now. But the dough was more or less a thick oval waiting for cutting at this point, so maybe silence was better.

  "I can see baking as a nice hobby," he said, laying a knight on the baking sheet. "You know, maybe learn how to knead bread. Roll out pasta. I love fettuccine, tortellini."

  "Those aren't baked pastas."

  "Did I say 'bake'? I meant 'cook.' Boiling stuff, baking stuff. It's all good." He laid another knight beside the first.

  "Further apart," I pointed out.

  "Why?"

  "So they don't grow together in the oven," I said. "They'll spread. Even after chilling."

  "Right," he said. He moved it an inch to the side, and it tore in half across its middle. I bit back a smile and kept cutting horses as Nathan's cheek twitched with irritation. He wadded his biscuit into a ball and started again.

  "So, do you bake? Boil? Cook in any form?" he asked.

  I shrugged. "No one bakes in my house," I said. "Mum's a bit of a processed foods nut. I'm never home long enough to care whether there's flour or sugar in the cupboards."

  "Somebody told me you worked in the pasty shop in the village, though," he said.

  "Why did they tell you that?" A tiny bit of suspicion in my voice — can't help it, honestly, since my ears are usually burning from village gossip about Kitty Alderson's checkered past.

  "Um...uh...it came up in conversation," he said. "We were talking, and something was said about your old job. Where you worked before you worked here."

  "Oh."

  "Nothing bad, I swear," he said. "Julianne was talking about how your potential was getting lost behind a fish fryer until you found your calling as an event planner in training."

  "More like she found it for me," I said, half-muttering. I paused in cutting. "That is ... Julianne gave me a shot. Not many in this village would do the same. I figure you can guess the reasons why."

  He laughed a little. "I'm not as connected to the village grapevine as you think I am." He cut another cookie. "Does 'grapevine' have the same meaning over here?"

  I glanced towards Julianne, who was busy trimming the rough edges of Dinah's gingerbread castle. I had hoped that Dinah would assign me to work with her — or work with Gemma, even — rather than stick me in this situation.

  Nathan broke the silence. "I'm trying to end the tension," he said.

  "What tension?"

  "Very funny," he answered. "I'm just trying to be friendly. Nice. I thought maybe since we work together sometimes, we could have a civil conversation."

  "About the cooking skills we don't have, eh?"

  He sighed with frustration. "You know, you don't have to be such a —"

  "Relax. I'm kidding." I broke into a grin — pretty rare for me — and gave him a look. "Talking's fine. I don't dislike you. I don't even know you, so how could I?"

  "You are a very weird girl," he said. But in a way that sounded like my mate's brother when he talked to his sis — not the way he talked to her annoying friends. There's a difference.

  "And you're cutting your knight's arm off."

  "Oh. Hm. I'll just kind of smush it back on him. There."

  That would never hold, but I didn't tell him.

  After cutting, we helped mix more dough, then more icing, as the biscuits chilled again. Two hours had already passed, and it was time for the midday break before the second half of the challenge. And with four times the crowd in the sitting room, that was a long line and a quick cuppa.

  "Where's Dinah?" said Gemma, who had snagged one of Charlotte's buns from the trays that Lady Amanda was hastening to refresh.

  "Still working on the castle," said Julianne. "It's still threatening to topple on one side."

  "What about the dragon?" said Gemma. She lowered her voice. "It's a bit complicated, isn't it? How will she ever get it to stand upright?"

  I had seen Dinah's drawings, and it looked tough. But I'd also seen the other competitors — one of them building a gingerbread replica of Whitehall, even. Dinah had looked quite rattled for a second when she saw it.

  Ten minutes after break, Julianne baked the biscuits me and Nathan had cut. Rows of little horses and knights, fresh from the oven, were cooling in front of oscillating fans — some were a bit burnt, but not badly. I mixed decorative icing for piping as Gemma mixed construction icing for Dinah's towering castle — Julianne was holding up one of those tricky pointed towers as Dinah tried to cement it in place with the hardening sugar paste.

  The little knights and horses were merely piped outlines with a bit of fancy work where the armor should be. Dinah showed me how, and put one together for me and Nathan as Gemma piled the cooled gingerbread cookies beside us.

  "This should be simple." Nathan lifted a bag of construction icing and snipped its tip. A little big, but it would do, so I didn't point out that he'd be shooting great gobs of frosting on his target.

  "It takes a lot of icing to hold these together," he said, as he glued a knight to the horse along the little space between the knight's legs, then glued the horse to its stand. "He looks like he's wading through the snow."

  "Just keep gluing," I said. Dinah would probably fix that part later. Besides, it was closing upon two o' clock, and we only had a quarter of our army glued together properly.

  "I'm gluing," he said. "Only they're falling apart." One soldier slid off his horse and lay sideways in the clotted icing, like a Norman conqueror fallen in the snow — just like a picture I remembered in an old history book of my gran's.

  "Hold him together," I said. "I'll put a bit more icing around its feet."

  "I think the horse's feet snapped off," said Nathan. "It'll be shorter than the rest."

  "It's a pony, then." Something was wrong with this icing, obviously. Gemma must have mixed up the wet ingredients when compounding it.

  "Darn. I killed another one." Nathan's soldier had snapped in half at the knees. He looked a bit depressed — Nathan and the soldier — as the biscuit pieces fell amongst the g
lobs of icing. I snorted back a laugh. It really oughtn't be funny that everything was going wrong.

  "I'm mixing up new icing," I said, dumping ingredients in the bowl as I spoke. "This stuff will never hold. Pipe some design on those last soldiers while I'm working."

  "Hold on. Whoa. I'm not a decorator," he said. "I don't pretend to have any knowledge about glitter glue or scrapbooking, so I'm not the person to ask to dress up toy knights with frosting."

  "It's just a few lines and squiggly bits," I said. "And you've got to do it, because we're running out of time, and there's still the dragon to finish."

  The dragon, thus far, was nothing but a three-sided biscuit frame with lots of scaly things piped on it. Dinah was trying to attach its tail, which didn't want to go on it, but simply fell over on the newly-piped moat door instead.

  Nathan looked doubtfully at the piping bag I handed him, as if it contained a snake instead of frosting. With a grimace, he put a bit on the coat of the nearest knight.

  He wasn't bad at it, really. He drew nice little lines that looked almost like proper chain mail. Even a little sword belt and sheath outline on one, instead of the little curly things and rivets we'd been painting on the rest.

  Bite your tongue, Kitty. If I said a word, he'd probably muck up the rest of the lot due to stupid masculine pride or something, and we needed every good bit coming our way. One table away, the little gingerbread carousel now had multicolored biscuit animals circling its turning post. Leeman Lawson's legendary signature design, as all Ceffylgwyn knew.

  "What's this piece for?" Nathan said, lifting an odd-shaped long gingerbread biscuit from the pile. "This one spread way, way out of control. I think it must be two or three cookies in one."

  The 'cookie' sagged a bit, then snapped in half. Nathan looked startled. I couldn't help the laugh that escaped me.

  "It's an extra piece," said Nathan. "I'm sure. We'll just toss it or something."

  "It's not ours ... oh, blast it, it's the dragon's," I said, dropping my voice to a hush. I heard a gasp from Gemma just then — but it was for a castle tower that attempted a nosedive.

  "Hold it up, quick now!" said Dinah, who leaped to its rescue. None of them noticed the two of us and the broken bits in Nathan's hands.

  "What part?" he said to me. "This doesn't look like a dragon in any way, shape, or form."

  "I dunno. It's the neck, or a bit of a leg or something, but that's what it is," I said. "Dinah's not even begun the part of it that's supposed to be upright."

  "No problem. Nope," said Nathan. "We'll just glue it back together." He flipped the pieces over, and I put some glue along the seam.

  "It's oozing out the front."

  "She'll cover that part with decoration," he said. "Put a lot on there."

  "She'll kill us, you know. The dragon's the important part of all this."

  "It'll be fine," said Nathan. "Just let it dry a little." He grabbed the fan and held it close to the frosting.

  The glue might have held the pieces together — but it also fastened them to the parchment below. I heard a ripping sound as we tried to peel it away a minute later, and then a snap as another piece of the biscuit came free.

  We were huddled too close for my comfort, pressed even closer when he reached for the frosting bag again. I could feel Nathan brushing up against me by accident, and noticed there was a decent bit of muscle evident beneath his rolled sleeve — I admitted to myself that he was probably better at rolling gingerbread. The dining room felt terribly hot, suddenly, from all the ovens crisping the gingerbread. I edged away from Nathan a little.

  "Darn," said Nathan, who was trying to peel the bits of paper off now. "Quick, get some more icing —"

  "What is that?" said Dinah. "What are you two — oh, for heaven's sake! Put that down," she said to Nathan. Her eyes were wide as saucers at the sight of our handiwork on the dragon's missing part.

  "I'm sure it can be fixed," he began.

  "It's in three pieces!" she said. She closed her eyes. "Never mind it — we'll salvage what we can. Hand me a knife," she said to me. "We'll shorten his neck and see what else can be done." She sliced away the jagged edges, reshaping the pieces.

  The dragon ended up with gills extending from its face, and a neck that now hugged around the castle rather than towered above it. It was Dinah's piping and a bit of extra shaping on the leftover pieces that saved it. Plus, the nice curly tail had managed not to break.

  "Soldiers in a line," panted Dinah. "Two by two out of the moat. Quick now," she said, glancing over her shoulder at the clock: a quarter to five. She swept away the bits of icing left around the castle.

  It looked a treat, especially the massive dragon. But it didn't stand a chance against the working carousel, we all knew, as we watched the little colored animals turn to the sound of a music box tune. And maybe not against the toy box or the gingerbread lighthouse that Jenny Bryce was sitting smugly behind.

  "It's practically cheating," muttered Gemma under her breath. "Leeman used to build that same carousel every year for his shop window. He used a set of shop biscuit cutters, too."

  I saw icing on the bridge of her nose, and wondered if she knew the camera was on us right now. At the same time, I felt something brush against my hair — Nathan's fingers were responsible.

  "Just a little frosting," he said. "Thought I'd take care of it for you." He hadn't bothered to clean the icing sugar from his own person yet, I was tempted to point out to him.

  Dinah's dragon was good enough for fourth, even beating the pirate ship made by the boy whose frogs had turned into burnt little lumps last round. Fourth was good enough, judging from her relief when the judges announced it. The rest of us had a proper cheer when it was announced, and got crushed into the fold of a group hug by Julianne.

  ***

  Julianne:

  "A little more to the left," I told Kitty. "There. That's got it."

  Now that the grand biscuit faceoff was over, we were rearranging the dining room's tables to take up less space without teams to occupy them. I had assumed we'd simply have them moved until the day of the final challenge — but that wasn't what the producers had in mind.

  "Gemma was a little hard on Leeman Lawson's carousel," I said, as we straightened the tablecloths. "I don't think it's necessarily cheating since it's really his own design."

  "It's only because Leeman was a bit of a snob in the village," said Kitty. "He rubbed in the fact that his recipes were the best, and always said he'd take his secrets to the grave. But his carousel was always a proper job. When I was a kid, he used to put it in the bakery window every spring. I wasn't even as tall as me mum's knees, so she'd lift me up to see it."

  A nice memory, I thought. Leeman might have held up his nose a little too high for Ceffylgwyn, but it hadn't prevented his skills from making others happy — and he wasn't in the grave yet, so maybe there was still time for him to share his secrets. Not that winning The Grand Baking Extravaganza would encourage him to do it, I imagined.

  "Need a hand?" Nathan, who had appeared unnoticed, seized the other end of a table that Kitty, with a grunt, had begun moving aside.

  "I've got it," said Kitty, who was grasping both corners. Her stubborn tone was back, even though its conviction was lacking a little.

  "Which way?" said Nathan. "Towards the windows, right?" He lifted one end and carried it as Kitty and I carried the other.

  "Thank you," I said. "And to what do we owe the honor of your visit? I thought you'd avoid us a little after the dragon mishap." Nathan actually blushed for a moment, then recovered himself.

  "Nothing," he said, as he helped shove the table into place. "I'm just here to check in with the production crew before they get started today. They promised some commercial footage would be ready for the tourism board to review. If people don't see proof that Cornwall is the latest home of the Baking Extravaganza, then we can't sell fans on visiting here, right?"

  Kitty and I exchanged glances. "What's the producti
on crew doing today?" I asked.

  "You didn't hear yet? They summoned all the contestants to be here in two hours. The crew will be here any minute." He checked his watch. "Something about whenever there's an extra day between the second and third challenges, there's always a pop quiz bake, or something."

  I knew it. "Any idea what they have in store?" I asked.

  He grinned. "It wouldn't be a surprise then, would it?" he said. "Speaking of surprises, do you know anything about the Minack Theatre?"

  "Of course," I said. "Anybody's who's lived in Cornwall for more than a few weeks knows about the amphitheatre on the sea."

  The Minack Theatre possessed a view breathtaking enough to rival my beloved view which gave Cliffs House its name, as impossible as this confession seems. I had been there once before with Matt, and had been dazzled by the soft horizon at nightfall, and the ancient grandeur its modern stonework conveyed. It created a harmony between history and nature that seemed alive during that concert, with me and Matt under the stars and facing the sea, with imaginations capable of transforming those stones into a castle's ruins, or a second Stonehenge.

  "Well, my next paying gig — pardon the distinction — is some tourism promotion work for one of their upcoming events. Anyway, they gave me a couple of tickets to something they're having tomorrow night, and I thought maybe I'd let you have them, if you and your husband are interested."

  "We'd love them," I said. "But I really can't. I'm still helping fill Dinah's shoes around here until the end of the week. Besides, you should go. It's worth seeing, trust me."

  "It's not that I'm not a theatre lover," he said. "It's just that I thought maybe somebody else would enjoy it more than a guy sitting alone on some stone bleachers." He looked at Kitty. "Unless maybe ... you'd like to see the show?"

  Two spots of pink had invaded Kitty's cheeks during this conversation — a quick flash of color I'd seen appear more than once whenever people talked about theatre and performance art.

  "If you're not busy, then think about it. I could pick you up tomorrow afternoon," he said. "I've got a little meeting with the manager, then it's basically showtime. Very good seats, I've been told."