Page 76 of A Manny for Christmas

There was a particularly hairy moment when we moved the little church and the weather vane fell off, but, aside from that minor hiccup, ‘moving day’ has gone without a hitch.

I adore my job. I adore the stimulus it gives both halves of my brain. Baking is arguably the most technical aspect of cookery: more science than art. It’s an equation that must always be balanced. An experiment whose inputs must always be constant. It follows, then, that a large part of my job is controlling those inputs. Balancing the variables in my equation. Oven temperature. Dough consistency. Aeration levels.

So when I get to work on a project as deliciously creative, indulgent, even, as a gingerbread village, it feeds that right side of my brain in a way that makes me light-headed with happiness. My flow state while building these structures has been incredible.

Sure, it’s been rife with technical considerations and endless faffy bits and the need for insane levels of detail-orientation. Luckily for the guests and members of Sorrel Farm, I’m as anally retentive as they come. This is my bag. Hence the hours and hours my team and I have spent pouring over the details outside of our regular shifts.

Rolling out the fragrant gingerbread using rolling spacers so it’s a consistent thickness throughout.

Stealing the kitchen’s freshly sharpened pizza cutters to minimise drag on the dough when cutting out the shape for every wall, every roof.

Also cutting out dozens of little square, round, hexagon and star-shaped windows with mini cookie-cutters.

Line-icing the edges of every single piece before flooding the rest of it with a runnier consistency of icing to create a spectrum of pretty, pastel-coloured buildings.

Mixing firmer icing for the endless, impossibly sweet trims of snowflakes and flourishes… because more is always more in a festive gingerbread village. There’s no place for minimalism here, a philosophy to which the dozens of jars and bowls of jelly beans and lollipops, candy canes and liquorice, marshmallows and frosted pretzels, and other edible and non-edible decorations can attest.

Once we completed those steps, the next stage of production involved embellishing every surface with the decorations, laying them out and discussing colour schemes and sweet patterns with the Visual Merch guys before we stuck them all down with royal icing and then, carefully, awkwardly, assembled our buildings.

A few years ago, playing around in the kitchens of the Savoy, my former team and I made a discovery. The royal icing was strong enough to stick the sweets to the gingerbread, but not strong enough to hold the buildings up as securely as we liked. Sticky, hot caramel, on the other hand? Nowthatwas the perfect mortar for our tiny masterpieces. Thanks to shallow frying pans full of caramel, whose buttery, sugary scent nearly drove us insane with lust as we dipped the edges of the flat sides in, our buildings should last out the festive season in fine style.

Now, we have a selection of houses in sugared-almond shades of pinks and blues, their roofs bound along the apex with velvet and satin ribbons and finished with glorious, floppy bows. There’s a red-and-white church, vane now freshly secured on its slim spire, which the VM team places on a hill they’ve covered in lashings of green-dyed desiccated coconut.

Blue smarties and silver ball-bearings mark the path of the village stream, and we carefully put in place its very own snowy bridge, crafted from Cadbury’s chocolate fingers dusted with icing sugar. They’ve even woven a traditional wooden railway track around the village, with a battery-operated wooden train that will chug around and around. I know for a fact that Derek from the VM team has borrowed it from his son and stuck glittery snowflakes to the train’s tiny engine and carriages.

But best of all? The VM team puts tiny strands of LED lights inside the buildings, controllable remotely. And as daylight leaves us for the day, one of my colleagues dims the huge Oast House chandeliers enough for us to test out the lights.

Sadie is standing beside me, capturing the moment on her phone for social media. A hush falls over our small gaggle as Derek presses his remote control and the village comes to life.

It’s stupid. I know it is. I’m an adult most of the time, but there’s something about seeing this project, which has been such a labour of love for me, finished and illuminated, that makes me indescribably emotional.

Maybe it’s the crazy cocktail of hormones Max has been flooding my body with.

Maybe it’s the fact that creating the village has fulfilled my creative, childlike side in the most complete way.

Maybe it’s the simple professional satisfaction of seeing a job well executed, or the maternal delight that comes with knowing how many kids—and adults—will get a real kick out of this mini masterpiece, both tomorrow, when Sadie and Evelyn host London’s top food and lifestyle journalists and their kids for a special unveiling, and over the entire festive season.

Whatever it is, I’m glowing. I’m delighted with the way it’s turned out, delighted that, unlike most of my creations, the village will last more than a couple of hours before it’s devoured and gone forever.

Sadie hugs me tightly against her with one arm. ‘It’s so unbearably pretty, I could cry,’ she tells me. ‘It makes me so fucking happy. I’m going to come in and stare at it every single day.’

‘Thank you.’ I sling an arm around her waist and hug her back. ‘Me too. Glad I’m not the only weirdo who’ll be doing that.’

‘It’s not weird. There’s nothing weird about enjoying the fruits of very talented people’s hard work and passion and creativity. It’s a simple pleasure. And it’s cute as fuck. It might feel like a gimmick, but it’s not. It’s a beautiful expression of the festive spirit, gorgeously executed. So there.’

‘Wow.’ I release her and nod, impressed. ‘Nicely said. Thanks.’

‘You’re basically the most beautiful person I’ve ever met, you cook like an angel,andyou’re somehow really humble. All of which leads me to conclude that Max Rutherford will slide a ring on your finger before Christmas is out.’

‘You’re smoking crack,’ I tell her, trying to tamp down the annoying and totally unnecessary fairies doing a happy fairy dance in my stomach right now (or is it further south than that?) at her words. ‘Nothing’s changed.’

‘Nothing’s changed excepthe told you it was real,’ she annunciates with a firm tilt of her chin. ‘Oh, and you already have kids. So you’ve taken that particular conundrum away from him.’

My panic begins to rise, because Max and the kids are, in fact, due here at any minute, a fact of which Sadie is aware. He offered to pick them up from school so I could get the village finished and bring them here for a sneak preview. The last thing I need is Sadie shooting her mouth off, especially in front of Daisy and Toby.

‘I have kids,’ I parrot back at her, quietly enough that no one around us can hear, ‘and they are definitely asrealas all the other stuff he’s spouting on about. So, no matter how ridiculous the chemistry is, and how hot the sex is, and no matter how many scary things we’re both feeling right now, the scariest thing of all is that he probably hasn’t changed his mind about wanting kids.’

She opens her mouth to argue with me, but I hold a hand up. ‘Therefore, it’s totally out of my hands. The man has a black-and-white decision to make. Stay or go. Kids or no kids. And I can’t even bear to think about it, so for the love of God, just let me bury my head in the sand and enjoy his obnoxious gorgeousness and bedroom talent and all-round general sweetness for a little while longer.’

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