Chapter 23
twenty-three
K ristie checked her plastic tote to make sure she had all the ingredients she needed for her spiced chai apple crumble tart with maple glaze.
She was doing a pate sucrée crust with a very delicate blend of spices on the apples—which couldn’t be cooked for too long, but definitely had to be cooked for long enough. The maple glaze took everything to a new level and then toned it all down at the same time.
Some of the spices in this recipe she had found scrawled in the margin of an old church cookbook during one of her first cleaning Sabbath days definitely had a medicinal quality—like tea—but the apples, sweet pastry crust, and maple glaze made this a beautifully balanced dessert.
“All right, guys,” she said to her cat army. “I left the back door open; you can go out, and there’s plenty of food and water. Bob, don’t be greedy.” She pointed at the orange tabby. Bob simply yowled at her as if she were leaving him for a month instead of just the afternoon and evening.
She, Lennie, Jocelyn, and Harper had agreed to meet at Lennie’s house to practice their bakes and have dessert night. Since everything took hours, they’d moved it from the first Friday of the month to the next day—Saturday.
Kristie had been in a farrowing pen that morning, but now she had everything she needed to work in Lennie’s oversized kitchen for the rest of the day. She wasn’t sure how she felt about it—Lennie was like a whirlwind in the kitchen, whereas Kristie preferred a more careful and calm approach.
There would be so many different flavors and smells in the room, and her nose wrinkled. Still, an excitement built beneath Kristie’s breastbone as she loaded her big plastic bin into the back of her SUV and headed toward her friend’s house.
Jocelyn had already arrived, but Kristie wasn’t surprised to see she’d beat Harper.
She was probably at the grocery store right now, buying what she needed for her peach bourbon layer cake with brown butter frosting.
Kristie could admit she loved brown butter on almost anything, and mixing it with cream cheese and powdered sugar to make a frosting simply added up to heaven for her.
Jocelyn had been extremely tight-lipped about her dessert, but Lennie had been talking about her chocolate espresso pavlova for days now.
Thankfully, Lennie stood at the screen door and held it open for Kristie as she lumbered under the weight of her tote and climbed the front steps.
“Hey, girl,” she said, the scent of coffee drifting onto the front porch.
“Hey,” Kristie said brightly as she entered the house.
Lennie’s kitchen sat in the back corner, with an enormous peninsula that allowed them to work on either side.
Kristie took the station next to the wall, as Lennie and Jocelyn had already taken the other two spots in the kitchen.
Lennie had double wall ovens—as they all had to bake something that day—and she had three stand mixers lined up down the middle of the countertop.
“I’ve got your apron right here,” Jocelyn chirped as she held up a blue apron with an apple on the front and Kristie’s name embroidered beneath it.
“Jocelyn, this is amazing,” Kristie said. “Where did you get this?”
“This lady in my neighborhood makes them. She said she’ll embroider anything you want onto anything.” She glanced over to Lennie. “And Lennie got the aprons from her school.”
“Well, thank you,” Kristie said, looping the apron over her head and tying it around her waist. “Yours has a lemon on it.” She raised her eyebrows, but Jocelyn only shook her head. She probably wouldn’t work from a recipe either, so Kristie couldn’t even steal a peek at that.
“It’s Mission who wants to know what you’re making,” she said as she started removing her ingredients from her tote.
“It’s Mission who wants to know what I’m making?” Jocelyn repeated, her eyebrows sky-high now.
Kristie cut a glance toward Lennie, whose pink apron featured a bar of chocolate on the chest. The last remaining apron lay on the counter—and of course, it had a peach in the center of it.
“Yes,” Kristie said, holding her head high. “Okay, so, I told him I would try to get samples of all your desserts today so he could taste-test them tomorrow.”
“Why wait until tomorrow?” Lennie asked. “He should come over tonight and do dessert night with us.”
Jocelyn sucked in a gasp as if this was the greatest news she’d ever heard. “That’s an amazing idea, Lennie. Text him right now, Kristie, and invite him over tonight.”
She froze, not quite sure she wanted to unleash all of Lennie, Jocelyn, and Harper—and their complicated desserts for the State Fair—on Mission in one go.
“Well, he might be busy,” she said, her voice too light.
“Oh, she’s deflecting,” Lennie said. “Why don’t you want us to meet your boyfriend?”
“You talk about him all the time,” Jocelyn added. “We practically know him already.”
“I do not talk?—”
“Help!” Harper yelped from the front door, interrupting her.
“Oh, cocoa beans,” Lennie cried, running to get the screen door. “I’m so sorry. I thought I’d hear your car.”
“I had to get a ride,” Harper said darkly, entering with her arms laden with grocery bags. “The driver was in one of those electric things, and you know—they’re totally silent.”
Kristie had been totally right that Harper had just come from the grocery store, and she helped get all the loops off her friend’s arms as she put the bags of ingredients on the counter in the last baking station spot.
“So where’s your car?” Lennie asked.
“It’s in the parking lot at Farmer’s,” she said. “I’m gonna have to figure out how to get it started later.” A long sigh escaped her lips, and she started unbagging her ingredients and looking at them like she didn’t know what they were for.
“I could call Cord,” Kristie said. “He might be able to go look at it.”
“Who’s Cord?” Jocelyn asked, glancing up from where she’d already started to sift her flour.
“He used to work at the Hammond family farm,” Kristie said matter-of-factly. “But he left a couple of years ago, and now he owns that mechanic shop over in Cherry Creek.”
“Could you?” Harper asked, wiping her bangs off her face. “I already feel like I can’t take on one more thing.”
“I’ll text him right now,” Kristie said.
“Then she’s going to text Mission,” Lennie said, giving Kristie a knowing look.
“No, I’m not.” Kristie threw her a sharp look right back.
“Why are we texting Mission?” Harper asked, glancing around at the three of them.
“She promised him she’d bring some samples of all our desserts,” Jocelyn said. “And we told her she should invite him over for tonight’s tasting.”
“Oh, that’s a great idea,” Harper said, instantly brightening. “You know what? He could be a blind judge! We won’t tell him who made what, and he’ll come taste them all, and then he’ll declare a winner.”
She looked around at everyone like she’d just come up with the best idea in the world—and to Kristie’s horror, Jocelyn was nodding, and Lennie looked like someone had plugged her in.
“This is a very bad idea, you guys,” Kristie said. She set her phone face-down on the counter. “I texted Cord.”
“Why is it a bad idea?” Lennie asked.
“Number one,” Kristie said. “He already knows what I’m making, so it won’t really be a blind taste test.”
“You could tell him you changed your mind,” Harper said.
“And then still serve an apple crumble?” Kristie gave her a death glare, then turned it on Jocelyn. “He won’t like being put on the spot.”
“Just ask him,” Lennie said. “If he doesn’t want to, he’ll say no, right?”
“You’ve said he’s opinionated,” Jocelyn added. “That he just tells you what he thinks.”
“I didn’t say he was opinionated ,” Kristie said. “You make that sound like a terrible quality.”
“I did not make it sound like a terrible quality,” Jocelyn said, glancing at Lennie. “Did I make it sound like a terrible quality—being opinionated?”
“It’ll help with my presentation,” Jocelyn added.
Kristie almost rolled her eyes, but she managed to refrain. “You can’t present your own dessert to him—then he’ll know it’s yours.” She looked at Harper—who was usually the level-headed one in the group—before she remembered that she was the one who had brought it up.
“I’d like to meet him,” Harper said. “You talk about him all the time, and you said he has a sweet tooth. Maybe he’ll be able to help us refine our recipes.”
“That’s why we’re tasting them for each other,” Kristie said.
“Let me just be clear,” Lennie started. “You don’t want to invite him, because you don’t want to put him on the spot? Or…you don’t want us to meet him?”
“Of course I want you to meet him,” Kristie said.
“Will you be embarrassed of us?”
“Of course not.”
“Are you worried you’ll be embarrassed of him?”
“No,” Kristie said more emphatically.
“I really don’t see why you can’t invite him, then,” Jocelyn said. “He doesn’t have to stay for all of dessert night. He can come see the finished products right when they’re done. We can present them to him as if we were on a baking competition.”
Her eyes lit up then, because she so wanted to be food chef and critic on TV. “We’ll serve him, and he can taste each dessert. Then he can tell us what he likes about them and what he doesn’t—and we’ll send him home.”
Kristie cleared the last of her spices from the tote and pulled it off the counter. She really didn’t have a good reason for why she didn’t want to invite Mission, other than it would be stepping onto new ground she’d never walked on.
“Would you like one of us to do it?” Lennie asked, pinning her sunny smile in place. “Because I bet Harper can get him here in no time flat.”
“We don’t want him here in no time flat,” Jocelyn said. “We need a few hours for our desserts, right?”
Lennie twisted and looked at the clock. “Should we say six-thirty? It’s three o’clock right now. Does anyone need more than three and a half hours?”
Kristie did not need that long, and she shook her head.
Harper slowly started to reach for her phone, and Kristie made no move to stop her. She collected Harper’s plastic grocery bags and put them in her tote, then moved to set it over the back of the couch.
When she turned around, she found all three of her friends gathered around her phone, with Harper’s thumbs flying across the screen.
“No, don’t say that,” Lennie said.
“Which part?” Harper asked while Lennie pointed.
Kristie’s heartbeat flooded through her chest. She couldn’t believe she was allowing her friends to do this. At the same time, she’d like Mission to meet her friends—and she’d like to see their reaction to him, too.
“Yeah, that’s perfect,” Jocelyn said. “Don’t make it more complicated than it needs to be.”
“All right,” Harper said. She looked up at Jocelyn, then Lennie, and finally Kristie.
They all looked at her.
Kristie swallowed, unable to speak, so she nodded instead.
Harper’s thumb dropped onto her phone. “Sent,” she said.
That seemed to break the tension in the room. Lennie clapped her hands together. “All right! We each get to pick a song, and you only get one skip. Jocelyn, you go first.”
“I want something by Fleetwood Mac,” she said, and Lennie started fiddling around with the playlist on her phone.
Kristie took her device from Harper and moved down to her station, looking at her recipe.
She’d made this apple crumble three times since she’d turned in her entry form for the King Arthur Baking Company Championship.
One of the rules was that they had to use the King Arthur brand flour in their recipe, and Kristie planned to put hers in the apple pie filling, the crust, and the crumble topping.
Her phone whinnied, and everyone pulled in a breath at the same time—herself included.
“What did he say?” Lennie asked.
Kristie reached over and picked up her phone, glad when she only had to read five words.
“Sure, I can do that.”
Lennie shrieked in delight, which startled Kristie enough to drop her phone to the counter. Jocelyn whooped, and Harper clapped, and then Lennie said, “All right, ladies! Let’s get serious. We have a real-life judge coming in only three and a half hours.”
And Kristie didn’t even scoff at real-life judge ; she simply started measuring her sugar and salt into the nearest stand mixer.