Cupcake Couture
Page 37
My celebrity client base grew at quite a frightening but exciting pace after Cheryl Cole publicly endorsed Cupcake Couture as her favourite brand of cupcake at her New Year’s party. I had made her a beautiful tower of white and silver cupcakes decorated with delicate, sugar butterflies, which had been inspired by her outfit at the 3D Christmas event. The photos of Cheryl posing in front of the cake tower, which dwarfed her tiny frame and of her biting into the thick swirls of buttercream flooded onto the Internet and were also published in Glamour, Grazia and most of the tabloid Press. The day the story broke, my website was overloaded, Zachary and I celebrated with a slap up meal at the Baltic restaurant (with a bottle of champagne that did not cost the GNP of a small country) and the Cupcake Couture name went global. I would like to say it made me rich overnight but of course it didn’t. I had a lot of hard work and ingredients to put in before I would be calling Coutts & Co, but everything was heading in the right direction and my bank balance was at last starting to look healthy again. As were Cheryl’s young girl fans who decided to stick two fingers up at Kate Moss and say – ‘Sorry, Kate, but cupcakes taste a damn sight better than skinny feels!’
At the end of May, I then made an entire Newcastle squad, including the management, out of black and white football cupcakes on a giant cupcake pitch for the party to celebrate Newcastle’s successful season in the Premiership. Alan Shearer gave a speech at the party and reminisced about discussing the cake for the party with Thierry back in December at the training ground. He toasted the club’s success in front of the cameras with a glass of bubbly in one hand and one of my cupcakes in the other. Shearer, Thierry, Doughballs, Chesney et al had no qualms about being nicknamed Team Cupcake. My brand was not yet labelled ‘by appointment to Her Majesty the Queen’ but I had the endorsement of King Alan Shearer and Queen Cheryl Cole, which, in the North East, was just as powerful.
Heidi threw herself wholeheartedly into planning a wedding to rival all weddings for herself and Hurley. She dusted off her own childhood scribbles and planned everything down to the tiniest detail, except for the cake, which she left to me. I was still in the planning stages and it was becoming my most difficult order yet. Designing cakes for celebrities I could do, but designing a cake for the most important day of one of my best friend’s lives was something altogether more important. Especially when that friend was Heidi whose whole life had been devoted to giving to others. The fact that I was also dating her fiancé’s brother (which was not, as I discovered awkward but simply strengthened our bond) added pressure. I would design her a cake that was unforgettable and exceptional and fabulous. Simple!
As for the rest of the country, the coalition Government continued to promised change, growth, a better economy, less debt and more jobs but with little yet filtering down to the little man. The recession was apparently showing official signs of coming to an end and the bankers had started claiming extortionate bonuses again. Things were looking up for most, although I still spared a thought for the people like myself who had been made redundant without so much as a thank you for giving us your precious time and who had not yet been as lucky as I to find a new direction. I suspected there would be ups and downs, dips and double and triple dips in the economy in years to come, but then that was what life was all about. It was how we rode through those dips that mattered. How we got from A to B, whether by a Roman Road or a Spaghetti Junction.
I had changed since my days at Blunts. I valued people and time more than I ever had. The stages of my life were becoming defined by recipes and cake designs, every one of which stuck in my memory either for how it looked and tasted or, more importantly and much more frequently, for the event it represented. I still hankered for a routine but my new routine inevitably embraced a certain amount of chaos because I was dealing with cake recipes and often with celebrities. My new workplace was a kitchen full of polka dot mixing bowls and buttercream and sprinkles. It was not an open plan, strip-lighted, non-descript space painted in company colours with a restricted view of the Newcastle Quayside, which I had at once considered to be a home away from home but which now I did not miss in the slightest.
Oh and as for Chris Rea and the driver next to him… well, they’re just the same.
THE END