Page 96 of A Recipe for Love
Adam waited for the two younger women to make their way back outside before he turned to his grandmother. He had to do better, didn’t he? Everyone else was chipping in to the best of their abilities and making Lowbridge work. He was the weak link here. ‘I am sorry. Show me again how to do it properly.’
Chapter Sixteen
Bella waved a spare baking tray over the set of twenty-four cupcakes cooling on the counter. Only having twenty-four hours to prepare had meant it had taken her until that afternoon to realise that baking cupcakes and cookies and decorating them was far too much to fit in the time. So the new task was making gingerbread, for which Flinty was frantically weighing out individual bowls of ingredients, and then decorating pre-made cupcakes, and then – time permitting – gingerbread decorating.
‘Hello! Anyone here?’ Jill struggled through the door with a plastic crate in front of her. ‘Punch bowl, fruit juices, and a bottle of voddy.’
‘Thank you.’ Again the short planning horizon had meant that offering cocktails had only come to Bella at the last minute, but it was a hen do, wasn’t it? They’d expect something.
‘What are we offering the drivers?’ Flinty asked.
‘Hadn’t thought about that.’
‘Don’t worry.’ Jill pulled out her phone. ‘Googling mocktails already.’
‘Thank you!’
By the time the hens arrived they had alcoholic and non-alcoholic cocktails lined up, gingerbread ingredients ready, and cupcakes (almost) fully cooled. There were six in the group, all in their twenties, all wearing sashes, very helpfully proclaiming their role in the wedding.
Jill was just about to slip out when the bride herself grabbed her arms. ‘Reverend Jill!’
‘Cecily? I didn’t realise this was your do.’
The bride nodded excitedly sipping her mocktail. ‘We were supposed to be doing whisky tasting, but I can’t cos…’ She pressed one hand to her belly and snapped the other to her mouth. ‘Oh, for no reason. Just didn’t fancy it.’
Jill glanced down at the bride’s slightly rounded stomach. ‘Well congratulations… on picking a new activity,’ she smiled.
‘Everybody, this is Reverend Jill. She’s marrying us.’
There was a volley of greetings.
‘I was just dropping off some stuff. I won’t hang around.’
The bride pursed her lips. ‘But you’ve got to. You should stay.’ She turned to Bella. ‘She can stay, can’t she?’
There weren’t enough ingredients for another participant, but another friendly face would be welcome. ‘So long as she doesn’t cut her hand off.’
‘What?’ The hens stared at Jill, who regaled them with the story of the great trial day blood fest.
‘Nothing like that will happen today. No sharp knives involved, I promise.’ She gathered the group, drinks topped up, around the island. There wasn’t really space for this many people to work but this was as much a party as a cookery class, so letting them all squash together felt more sociable than sending people off to their own little corners.
Bella talked them through mixing the wet and dry ingredients together for their gingerbread, letting the group follow along with her rather than doing a separate demonstration, and then she rolled her dough. ‘Ideally we’d leave it in the fridge for an hour before we roll, but we’re tight for time, so just make sure you put plenty of flour on the top to stop it sticking.’ Once her dough was a perfect pound coin thickness she picked a cookie cutter and cut out a perfect love heart. ‘OK. Your go. You can pick whatever shape cutter you like, or…’ Bella picked up a standard dinner knife and scored out the shape of another heart with the blade. ‘You can fashion your own shapes.’
As soon as the rolling out was finished Bella laid a mental bet with herself on who would go for the obvious shape first. And there it was. Maid of honour, giggling furiously at her gingerbread cock and balls.
The bride glanced at Jill. ‘Sorry Reverend. You can’t take her anywhere.’
Jill peered at the shape. ‘He’s got one ball bigger than the other.’
The critique from the vicar delighted the hens. Was that a business idea? Should she invite a member of the clergy to all her cookery nights? Pizza with a parson? Cake baking with a curate?
Ten minutes later the baking trays were covered with a range of cocks, balls, love hearts and one slightly worryingly misshapen pair of boobs. ‘For equality,’ the bride’s sister explained.
Flinty popped all of those into the oven, while Bella got things ready for the cupcake decorating. The hens seemed to be having fun, and Bella was starting to relax. Cake decorating was one of her real pleasures in life. People fell in love with food with their eyes long before their tastebuds got a look in, and dessert and afternoon tea treats in particular ought to be beautiful.
Each hen had three cupcakes to decorate and Bella had made up buttercream and fondant to demonstrate two different techniques. First, she showed them how to pipe a perfect buttercream rose on top of their cake. Next she demonstrated using a dash of food colouring in a ball of fondant to make different colours to create a simple graphic on the cake. Bella made a bright yellow sunshine that she laid across the top of her cupcake. For the third cake, she told them, they could do whatever decoration they wanted.
‘Cock and balls!’ squealed the maid of honour.
