Page 8 of The Golden Spoon

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In theBake Weekapplication video, I’d whipped up pavlova in the kitchen of my apartment. While it baked, I sipped a sherry and talked about my life in Boston, gave a tour of my expansive kitchen. Then I topped the meringue with a gooseberry reduction and lemon balm–infused whipping cream. I must have charmed them on some level, because a month later I got called in for an in-person interview and baking challenge. The baking challenge was held at a local culinary school in downtown Boston. I was led to a room with long metal countertops and an industrial oven and instructed to make a perfect quiche with a limited selection of ingredients. It was all very school, and I hated school. The judge was a producer of the show, a scout for Betsy, I was told. I recognize her now as Melanie, skulking around the side of the tent with an earpiece in. She was stern looking then as well, holding that same clipboard on her lap as she scrutinized my cooking technique, which I’ll be the first to admit is a bit unconventional. Too many rules just make me not want to play.

That day, as Melanie took a bite of my leek and Gruyère quiche, its crust perfectly flaky and warm from the oven, I knew from the slight flutter of her eyes as they closed that I was going to be a contestant onBake Week. The same way I know when a woman is going to go home with me at night. The next week a phone call confirmed it.

I begin chopping up chives for my filling, stirring them into a bowl with some salt and olive oil. I turn to go retrieve the goat cheese, and it’s only then I realize the refrigerator door has been hanging wideopen. I rush to it, examining my dough, which is meant to be fully cooled by now. It’s warm and gooey. Dammit. Is this fridge broken? I must have been distracted, though it seems like such a strange thing to do. I know I would have closed the door when I put the dough in. Wouldn’t I? Now I’m going to be well behind the others. For the first time in the tent, I feel a twinge of pure competition.The tent: Am I already drinking theBake WeekKool-Aid? I find all the lingo surrounding the show a bit absurd.

As I glance around the room to see if anyone caught my rookie mistake, I catch Lottie’s eye. She starts when I see her looking at me, immediately breaking eye contact and turning back to the dough she’d been scoring. Is it possible that someone could have opened the refrigerator door without me noticing? Intentionally? I look around at them, all so innocently busy with their bakes, and realize that of course, it’s completely possible.

LOTTIE

I pull my pan of milk, already frothing, off the burner and stir in a stick of butter as Betsy appears in front of me with her gaggle of cameras and microphones. She is wearing a royal blue jacket with shiny gold buttons. Her matching earrings wobble ever so slightly on her lobes as she addresses me.

“What breads have you decided to make today, Lottie?”

There’s a funny way Betsy talks that makes me feel both old and totteringandlike a small child. I wonder if I am the only one who feels that way, being the oldest here by a long shot, or if it is something she does to others as well. Certainly not Stella, I think, taking a glance across the tent at her. Stella, who practically worships Betsy Martin, is surely treated to a different sort of interaction, one that isn’t tinged with pity.

I barely slept last night and can feel the reminder of it pulsing at the back of my eyes. All the anticipation about facing Betsy and Archie and being filmed doesn’t help either. I’m not someone who has ever craved the spotlight. Quite the opposite, in fact.

“This is a summer stollen,” I say as Betsy scrutinizes the lumpy dough I’ve shaped into a hefty log. “Made with fresh fruit instead of candied.” I know that choosing a recipe this dated and out of style isprobably not advisable, but I told myself it’s best to cook what I know, and stollen is what came to me so I’ve gone with it. There’s not much time to play around or make mistakes. I don’t want to be sent home yet and my stollen is well practiced. I know I can get it right. Despite being served at holidays, stollen isn’t a particularly fancy or difficult kind of bread, it’s just a kind of fruitcake that had its heyday back when I was young. My mother adored them but rarely baked one, preferring to take me out to share a slice at a German bakery in town. I was never too excited about them back then, to be honest. As a child I found them dense and unappealing, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate their solidity. A hefty slice of stollen, particularly one laced with almond paste as mine is going to be, next to a mug of tea is as comforting a way possible to while away a winter afternoon.

“A stollen in summer? Thatisinventive.” The way she says it makes me think she might not mean it in the best possible way. I push through a surge of embarrassment, trying not to read anything into it, though my palms have suddenly gone clammy.

“And this is a pane bianco.” I pull back the tea towel I’ve draped loosely over my second bread, which has almost finished rising, to reveal a loaf that is folded and twisted into an S shape. Its ridges spill over with sun-dried tomatoes, fresh basil, thick chunks of mozzarella, and a generous dusting of fine parmesan waiting to be baked. I see her eyebrows move ever so slightly. Whenever we’ve watchedBake Weekon TV, Molly always laughs that it’s impossible to ever really know what Betsy is thinking due to all the Botox in her face. But this close I can definitely read her expression. It says “Yikes.”

“Using some old-fashioned recipes, aren’t you,” she says, her tone once again inscrutable. My stomach twists anxiously. The age of the recipe is not what we are meant to be judged on, I want to remind her. But instead, I nervously clear my throat.

“I prefer to think of them as classics,” I say quietly, gently replacing the towel. I look down at it, wanting to disappear until I remember the cameras and force myself to look up at her.

A bemused smile appears on her face. “Well, I look forward to tasting them, Lottie. Thank you.”

Betsy swishes away from the table and I let out a deep sigh, my muscles unclenching. I hadn’t realized I’d been holding myself so still. I pull myself together, turning back to my breads.

It took me so long to get here. I’ve applied toBake Weekevery year it has existed. For a decade I’ve spent nearly all of my spare time practicing every bake I could think of, working my way from breads to pastries to tarts and cookies until my daughter, Molly, told me I had to start finding other people to give them away to or she’d “go paleo,” whatever that means, because I was making her sick with so much sugar. Each March I would fill out an application online, my heart in my throat as I pushed send. Then I would wait anxiously for a week, a month, only to become consumed by the slow letdown that comes when you hear nothing back. I didn’t let myself give up, though. Every New Year’s Day I renewed my commitment to my singular goal, which was to be a contestant onBake Week. And this year, three weeks and four days after I’d sent in my application, I got a call back. I tried not to get my hopes up when I went in to do my live baking demo for Melanie, who is now watching from the far side of the tent. But I knew that this was it, I would have no other chance. I was shaking as she gave me the simple instructions to bake a chocolate cake. I felt as if the gods smiled down on me in that moment, because if there is one thing I know how to bake perfectly, one thing I’ve made time and time again, which I do still every year for Molly’s birthday, it is chocolate cake.

So I am not going to let Betsy shake my confidence when I’ve worked so hard and long to get here, because baking is not the only thing I’ve come to do at Grafton.

STELLA

I try not to look at any of the cameras dead-on. Instead I focus on my dough, kneading it, turning it, scoring it. It’s hard not to look up when you can feel all those glass eyes are staring at you, recording everything you do, every mistake you make. It’s disconcerting.Focus, Stella. I take my time braiding ropes of dough, shaping them into a loaf. Using a pastry brush, I paint on a slick of miso and sprinkle finely chopped green scallions across the top. It looks okay. Not perfect but good enough.Into the oven with you!I take a deep breath. I am not even meant to be here, I remind myself. It is some sort of fairy-tale miracle. My level of experience is just a fraction of what the other five have. Until last year I hadn’t even made a cookie, much less a layer cake.

Eight months before I was accepted toBake Week, I quit my job as a reporter forThe Republic. At that point I had never really baked anything that wasn’t from a mix. For about a week, I wallowed on the couch wearing what I optimistically called my “loungewear,” staring despondently at my phone, hoping for some rush of motivation that would bring me back from the brink. Leaving my job felt as much like a breakup as anything else I’d ever experienced, the sudden rush of endorphins followed by the steady decent into isolation and self-pity. Being a journalist was my passion, and I had invested everything I had into it over the lastdecade. Now I was despondent and directionless. Six days into my new life of unemployment, I was flipping through Flixer, looking for a show or a movie to watch, praying that I could find something that wouldn’t give me anxiety, when I stumbled acrossBake Week. Of course, I’d heard of it. Everyone has heard ofBake Week. But before my tenure on the couch, I’d spent what little extra time I had watching things I could talk about or write about at work. I’d watch whichever documentary about a woman’s brutal murder was being discussed at the office, or whichever edgy films were up for awards they would obviously not win, so that I could interject that they were robbed when it came up at lunch. A feel-good show about baking wouldn’t have given me the kind of adrenaline I needed then to keep watching. But as a thirty-five-year-old woman with a rapidly dwindling bank account who had no idea what she was doing with her life, I was in need of comfort, not thrills. I pushed play and settled back on the couch, expecting the entire thing to put me to sleep. Five hours later I found myself crying as I watched a woman named Alice, who’d just come out of an abusive relationship, win the Golden Spoon with an elaborately decorated Swiss roll.

It was then, my eyes still wet with tears, that the memory of the cookbook from my childhood came to me with a jolt. I went to my closet, pulling up a kitchen chair so that I could reach back into the top shelf, where I stored what few things I had from that time. Pushing away some extra blankets and a stack of notebooks, I saw the cardboard box, far in back, scribbled on one side with marker.

My family was plagued with the kind of dysfunction most people only ever read about. When I was just a baby, my mother left my father and me suddenly and with no explanation at all, or so I was told, not even a goodbye note. My father tried his best for a few years, but I suppose he couldn’t handle raising a little kid on his own. I was handed over to the state at the tender age of three and quickly swallowed up by the system, where I bounced around to different foster families, each new address worse and more chaotic than the last. Until I was sent to live with the Finkelmans.

The Finkelmans were the most nuclear-normal family I’d ever met—two parents and two kids, a boy and a girl, already in high school. When I first moved in with them, they took me to the mall. After fitting me for a new school uniform, we wandered into the bookstore. It was maybe the first bookshop I’d ever been to, full of shiny hardcovers in bright colors. The older kids went ahead, disappearing into the teen section. Mrs. Finkelman leaned over and told me to pick out any book I wanted. In my years of being carted around from place to place, I’d never been given such a gift. I remember walking up to a display of cookbooks and seeing Betsy Martin’sThe Pleasure of Dessert. It was as though the book was glowing from the shelf.

Maybe I wanted it only because it was right in front of me and there was a picture of an elaborate birthday cake on the cover, but I still remember the feeling I had when I saw that book. It signified something big and good, something that could be mine. In my imagination the cake on the cover was for me, and beyond it, smiling as they waited for the candles to be blown out, were the friends and family who I didn’t have but wanted. Mrs. Finkelman was confused by my choice and attempted to steer me back toward the children’s section. But I dug in my heels. I was so rarely allowed to choose anything for myself that I was not about to squander this opportunity. It had to be mine. I reminded her of her promise, that I could have any book I wanted. She relented, rolling her eyes as she took the book up to the counter.

Later, alone in my new bedroom, I pored over it, getting lost in meticulously decorated cakes, glossy fruit tarts, streusel-topped sweetbreads, friendly pies with slices neatly cleaved out. I’d never eaten anything like the desserts in these pages, never even seen anything so beautiful. I memorized the book. I had favorite recipes that rotated depending on my mood. I knew which one I’d bake for my best friend’s birthday, the best friend who I didn’t have yet, and which would be my wedding cake. They promised celebration, a lifetime of familial love and togetherness. It was as though the recipe for my future happiness could be found within the book’s glossy pages.

As I got older, I forgot about the cookbook. I hadn’t ever baked anything from it anyway. Mrs. Finkelman never was one to let anyone into her kitchen, and besides, I was shuffled off to live in another home with another temporary family the next school year, and the book got put into a box of my things and forgotten about. It wasn’t until quitting my job atThe Republicand sitting on the sofa for a week in numb shock that I remembered it existed.

I pulled the box down. Inside were all the things I’d collected during my childhood years. A stuffed bunny, a beaded bracelet I’d made in kindergarten, and a notebook full of stories I’d made up. They were mostly things I’d found inside free boxes on the curb. One picture book had a sticker on the spine indicating I’d stolen it from the library. But there at the bottom of the box, still as glossy as the day Mrs. Finkelman bought it, was Betsy Martin’sThe Pleasure of Dessert.

I brought it back to the couch, where I’d made a pathetic nest for myself with blankets, and paged through it, taking my time as I absorbed the soothing images from my childhood. And then, with a surge of energy I hadn’t felt since the last time I wrote a particularly explosive tell-all article forThe Republic, I put on some real clothes and went to the grocery store. Even though it wasn’t close to my birthday, I decided I was going to bake myself a birthday cake.

Before I started baking, writing was the only thing I ever was good at, the only thing I’d ever wanted to be good at.The Republicwas my dream job, or so I’d thought.The Republicwasn’t straight journalism—what is these days—but it was a news site with guts. I’d wanted to work there since its founder, the iconic Hardy Blaine, came to talk to my college journalism class. He was edgy and smart. He’d built the site from the ground up and ushered in a new thing: journalism with a point of view. It all made him andThe Republicvery attractive.