Page 35 of The Devil She Knows
No,pear.
She had it. Into a plastic shopping basket she found sitting on the ground she tossed four pears, a lemon, the canister of brown sugar, and—She frowned down into the basket. She really should’ve thought this through better. Setting the basket aside, Sam sprinted back to her station and rifled through a cabinet looking for—Aha!Found it. With a pinch bowl in hand, she hustled back to the pantry.
“Twenty-five minutes, chefs!” Daphne shouted.
Shit. Sam didn’t have time to measure anything properly;a pinch of salt, two liberal dashes of cinnamon, just a smidgen of nutmeg, and one vanilla bean went into the small glass dish. Next, she snagged a fifth each of absinthe and rye whisky, along with a teeny-tiny bottle of Peychaud’s bitters and a quarter pint of pear brandy, then hauled ass to the adjacent refrigerator, where she grabbed two jumbo chicken eggs and two sticks of unsalted butter, and she really hoped Hannah didn’t need whole milk for her pâte de guimauve because Sam swiped the whole jug.
Back at her station, she dropped everything onto the counter beside Daphne, who instantly perked up and began to pick through the assortment of items in Sam’s basket.
“Ooh, absinthe?” Daphne held the bottle up to the light, her pale face bathed in a ghoulish green glow. “What are we making?”
“Iam making a chocolate bread pudding with brown butter poached pears in a Sazerac sauce.” Sam snatched the absinthe out of Daphne’s hands and set it aside. She dropped her voice to a low whisper. “Don’t you have something better to do than harass me?”
Like host the show, maybe?
Sam glanced pointedly in the direction of the man holding the camera standing only a few feet away on the other side of the kitchen island.
“Harassyou?” Daphne held a hand to her chest. “Good golly gosh, Chef Cooper, I’m not here to harass you; I’m here tohelpyou.”
Sam narrowed her eyes skeptically. “Help me?”
That sounded like a crock of shit to her, but then again,most of what came out of Daphne’s mouth either sounded like hooey or later proved to be, so this specific proclamation wasn’t particularly eyebrow raising.
“You had the highest cumulative score heading into our dessert round, and therefore, per the rules here atDaphne’s Inferno, you’ve won yourself a sous chef for the final round.” She beamed and it didn’t take a genius to see where she was headed with this. “Me.”
Uh-huh. “Great. Why don’t you just sit there and try not to get in my way?”
Daphne gave her a cheeky shimmy of her shoulders. “Yes, Chef!”
Sam grabbed a thin-bladed serrated knife from the wooden block and quickly cubed seven or so cups’ worth of the sheet cake, scraping off the frosting, and placing the cubes in a large metal mixing bowl. Setting that to the side, she got to work whipping up a quick custard by combining her eggs, a quarter cup of brown sugar, two tablespoons of microwave-melted butter, a couple of tablespoons of pear brandy, and her spices, which she then poured over the cake, lightly tossing until the cubes were totally coated. To a lightly buttered seven-by-three-inch aluminum push pan, she added the coated cake cubes, then covered it tightly with foil.
Normally, Sam would bake her bread pudding in the oven, but she didn’t have time to wait for an oven to preheat to three hundred and fifty degrees, let alone the thirty to forty minutes it would take to cook. To the inner liner of a pressure cooker, she added a little over a cup of water and then carefully lowered the foiled pan into the pot. With the lid locked, she set the pressure release knob to seal and thetimer for twenty minutes and crossed her fingers, hoping that would be long enough for the bread pudding to set.
One component of the dessert down and two to go. Sam added a tablespoon of butter to a nonstick skillet over medium heat, peeled and quartered her pears while the butter was melting, and then added them to the pan. After cooking the fruit for about two minutes on each side, until it was nicely caramelized, she covered it with a lid and lowered the temperature to keep it warm while she waited for the bread pudding to finish.
All that was left was to prepare the Sazerac sauce, which really just meant warming the alcohol so it would be above the flash point when she ignited it, planning to flambé the bread pudding, thereby satisfying the requirement that the dessert be kissed by fire.
She reached for a saucepan and felt a sudden prickle at the back of her neck, the unnerving feeling of being watched. Doing her best to ignore it, Sam set the pan on the stove and turned to grab the final ingredients off the counter.
Daphne hadn’t moved from her perch, was instead staring at Sam with a smile tucked into the corner of her mouth.
Sam was immediately suspicious. “Why are you looking at me like that? Did I break some rule of the competition I don’t know about?” Maybe this was when the other shoe would drop, and Daphne would screw her over. Again.
Daphne tutted. “Always so suspicious, Samantha. So mistrustful.”
Was she for real? “Gee, I wonder why. It’s not like all you’ve done is give me a spate of reasonsnotto trust you.”
She looked at the camera and winced. Hopefully, they’dcut that out in post. Otherwise, Sam didn’t want to think about how saying the wrong thing could come back to bite her in the ass.
“For your information, I was admiring you in your element.”
“Admiring me?” Sam repeated.
“Mm-hmm.” Daphne scooted to the edge of the counter and hopped down, brushing invisible dust off her thighs. “You really know your stuff.”
Sam snorted and poured a splash of absinthe into the saucepan, then rolled the pan, coating the bottom the way she’d rinse a glass if she were actually making a Sazerac. “I guess I have you to thank for that, don’t I?”
Competency was, after all, part of what she’d wished for.
