Jade picked up the piping bag filled with green icing and began to laugh. ‘You’re right, it looks quite professional now.’ She looked for any other areas that needed a little manipulation without overwhelming the cake with too much greenery. She began to get a bit braver and mixed a little blue food colouring with red so she had a beautiful purple shade and then added it to some more buttercream to make petunias. She wasn’t sure they could be identified as the flower they were supposed to be, but they were perfect for this cake and she knew Barney and Lois were going to love them.
Nancy clapped her hands together. ‘I adore the purple, what a contrast! You’ve created something I’d be proud to serve up at any party or wedding.’ She was equally complimentary about Brian’s techniques. Jade wondered if she was being overgenerous but when she’d cleared up her workstation and returned to see the finished cake after not looking at it critically for a whole twenty minutes, she saw it as perhaps other people would. And she didn’t mind admitting it would look perfectly in place on a wedding table.
Jade left the course with her head bursting with new knowledge. It would take years to fully master a lot of these techniques as well as Nancy, but the last few sessions had been a start and she buzzed thinking how much the cake side of their business might take off. Rather than the odd local commission or cakes to display in the bakery window, word could spread far and wide and grow the business tenfold.
She arrived back home and carefully carried the cake from the car, across the garden that separated the bakery from the cottage, and straight into the kitchen. She slotted the cake onto the bench just inside the back door, opened up the box and took another look at her creation. She thought she might burst with pride. The lemon-elderflower sponge was covered in the palest buttercream frosting with the merest hint of yellow and finished with piping around the sides, looping at intervals to give it an air of sophistication. On the top at one side, she had a whole host of the roses she’d created in a yellow so pale it was almost cream – some big, others small, some unfurled into full bloom, a couple just beginning to open up. The purple flowers were indeed a wonderful contrast and the leaves between blooms looked natural and a part of her plan rather than piped to disguise any mistakes. The edible flowers actually looked like they could’ve been plucked from a cottage garden, she thought. People would never know! Barney and Lois were going to be so surprised and her heart beat faster thinking how she was going to show it to them as soon as she got herself over there.
But first, she wanted to freshen up and make herself more presentable. She closed the box and hotfooted it upstairs to the bathroom. She pulled off the denim shorts that had received a dusting of icing sugar despite being covered by an apron, and the light blue T-shirt she’d worn in the kitchen all day. Dumping the dirty clothes in her laundry basket, she put on more deodorant, re-dressed in a white linen top and a denim skirt and called out a hello when she heard Celeste come in downstairs. She couldn’t wait to show the cake off to her sister – she’d be so proud. She touched up her make-up a little, wanting to look professional when she took this prototype cake to the happy couple who had no idea they were about to get this service.
‘Did you see it?’ she called out, trotting down the stairs, hardly able to wait to show Celeste her handiwork.
But she didn’t get an answer, and when she glanced towards the back door she saw the top of the box that held her cake flipped up. She walked towards it with a feeling of dread in the pit of her stomach and recoiled when she saw a great big wedge had already disappeared from it. A knife lay discarded in the sink, covered with some of the lovely icing she’d so carefully spread onto her creation.
It was then she looked up and out of the window and saw the culprit sitting on a deck chair in the garden without a care in the world apart from the big slab of cake he was demolishing.
Linc.
She marched outside.
‘Hey!’ He brightened when he saw her coming and then hungrily dug his fork back in. ‘Great cake. Celeste told me to help myself. Really good,’ he said between mouthfuls as Jade stood stunned into silence.
The sun glistened on his tanned forearms with every flex of his tendons as he lifted the cake to his mouth to enjoy another bite. He only stopped when at last he clocked her reaction. There were only crumbs left on his plate by now and Jade got the impression he would’ve licked them up had she not been standing there.
‘Why do I get the feeling I’m in trouble?’
‘What makes you think you can help yourself to my cake?’ she yelled.
‘I told you, your sister said to help myself, so I did.’
She pinched the skin at the top of her nose, her eyes closed, attempting to stop herself blowing her top. ‘I doubt that.’
‘Are you calling me a liar?’
Just then Celeste emerged from the back of the bakery and into the garden where Jade was confronting the cake thief as he sat nonchalantly as though he’d never done a thing wrong in his life. ‘Hey, sis, how was the course?’
‘Great until someone ruined my cake!’
Celeste looked from Jade to Linc and the plate on the ground beside him. She looked confused. But then pulled a face.
‘Did you tell him to help himself?’ Jade demanded.
‘Not exactly.’ Celeste took a deep breath and looked at him. ‘Tell me you took a big chunk of the red-velvet cake with chocolate icing, Linc.’
Linc shook his head. ‘Definitely not chocolatey, nor red. But you did tell me to help myself to cake from the kitchen.’
Celeste closed her eyes briefly, realising the mistake. ‘He’s right, I did. But the cake I was referring to was beneath the cloche at the far end of the kitchen.’
‘I just heard cake.’ He realised his apparent error. ‘I’m sorry, really I am.’
But Jade wasn’t going to listen, she was too angry. She stomped back into the kitchen, seething. She looked at the cake that had been hacked and destroyed. All that hard work.
Celeste came in after her. ‘Wow, did you make those flowers? They’re stunning.’
‘What’s left of them,’ she grumbled.
‘This is all my fault. I should’ve been a bit more specific when I told Linc to help himself to cake. I didn’t realise you’d be coming back here with anything, let alone a masterpiece.’
Her compliment placated Jade for a few seconds but disappointment took over. ‘I worked all day on it, I was so excited to show it to Barney and Lois. It was a prototype, for their wedding.’
