Chapter Seventeen
Friday Morning Kendric House
Everything I’ve seen online says that fresh baked scones compared to shop-bought ones are like real flowers to plastic. Besides, I can bake a hundred scones at home for the price of buying twenty from the supermarket. The only problem is, I’ve never baked a scone in my life, but the internet assures me it’s a walk in the park. so I’m going to try.
The internet is also full of recipes for sandwiches. Most of them unusable.
The Michelin starred cafés in London, the ones Mum and Horrible Howard would go to, charge ￡120 per person. What can they serve for this kind of money? Because I might be able to make it here.
I scroll through various menus on my phone, spinach bread filled with octopus ragu, smoked rabbit liver pate, mountain goat cheese with micro herbs on purple potato bread, I put my phone on the kitchen table, face-down.
Why do restaurants do this? We’ve heard of gilding the lily, but this is burying the lily in gild. I can’t imagine Bill or Shirley or even Gethin having any truck with green bread and smoked cheese. And Jack, poor man, would be scared half to death if I offered him purple bread.
My feeling – please God let me be right – is to keep it traditional. Butter and cucumber, obviously. Cream cheese and ham. Egg and cress. What else? How about coronation chicken; there has to be recipes for that online. I drive down to the bakery in Llancaradoc, and they promise to make me white bloomers and tiger bread. Then I order ingredients from the supermarket to deliver. Clotted cream, because I’m never going to be so ambitious a to attempt making that. The same goes for Jam.
What I really want to do, is give my grandfather and his friends a really wonderful cream tea; this ambition wins over my need to be economical because the big Sainsbury in Lampeter has so many exciting kinds of jam and marmalade. Also, English Breakfast tea, Darjeeling, Ceylon, Earl Grey, Green tea… The only economy is in making the scones instead of buying them, But any savings there are off-set by buying lots of flour, sugar and butter because it will take a few trial bakes before I get it right.
I don’t care.
I want this to be wonderful. For all of them. They deserve it after boiled dish-rag tea Jenkins serves.
The next morning, the shopping arrives at 7am. Armed with my downloaded recipe lists, I start experimenting.
The first batch of scones, made with sultanas, double cream and brown sugar, come out dense and heavy. Alex and Llewellyn who agreed to be my guinea pigs, take a polite – and tiny – bite and leave the rest.
I try again without the dried fruit. Similar results.
“They taste okay,” Alex says, perching on the edge of the kitchen counter and chewing one. “But why does it look like something you use to plug the sink with?”
“Don’t be an ass,” Llewellyn tells him. “They’re okay.”
“But I don’t want okay. I want light and fluffy and delicious.”
Llewellyn gets up from his chair at the small table where I’d set up small pots of cream and jam. “Call us again. We’re happy to keep tasting.”
“But” – Alex adds, laughing – “maybe make us a larger pot of tea to wash them down with.”
“Shut up.” Llewellyn punches his arm on their way out.
They go back to their work and I try another batch. Then another. Then another. Two hours later I have a very large tray piled high with thirty scones that look like floor tiles.
“Don’t give up,” Llewellyn says, kindly. “Steve Jobs made a hundred computers that failed before he invented Apple.”
“I don’t have time for a hundred failed batches. The guests are coming tomorrow afternoon, that’s less than twenty-four-hours. And I’m going to run out of flour and butter.”
If I can’t make these, I’ll have to buy them. Damn I really wanted to bake scones. Everyone says it’s easy.
Alex, meanwhile, has been busy on his phone. Now he looks up. “Leonie, come and watch this.” He thrusts the phone at me.
It’s a YouTube clip of a woman making scones. Correction. Making “THE BEST SCONES RECIPE EVER”.
“There are lots of these,” I tell him. “Mostly click bait and influencers. You can tell by how much make-up they have on while cooking. I wanted a reliable recipe.”
He looks meaningfully at the stack of floor tiles I’ve baked.
“Okay let me see.” I take his phone and watch it through until she pulls out of the oven a tray of soft crumbly scones so incredible I want to cry. It’s not fair.
“So?” Alex asks. “Any clue?”
Actually yes.
I take up my phone and watch more clips, paying attention to how they mix the dough.
So that’s where I’ve gone wrong. The recipe said not to overwork the mixture, but I misunderstood and had been kneading it like bread.
It shouldn’t be kneaded at all, just mixed and sort of clumped together. It looks bad, but apparently that’s how it should be.
And in one recipe, the woman used 7-Up to make it even airier.
One more trip to the shops for more ingredients before baking a new batch.
After that, Llewellyn and Alex don’t wait for an invitation. They keep popping their heads into the kitchen hoping for something to taste. The three teenagers, Wyn, Rhian and Ricky who usually hang around also find out and become eager volunteers, offering to wash up, carry stuff and even clean and valet my car.
“Shame Evan and Haneen won’t be here.” Llewellyn says. He’s always kind and considerate. But Haneen and her family wouldn’t come back from the Channel Islands until the day after our tea party. When I spoke to her, she agreed it was best not to rock the boat with Cynthia by changing dates.
Cynthia’s very grudging permission to let us use the van and bring seven of her residents to Kendric House was conditional on Raff keeping an eye on me. She was worried in case of any sharp knives I might wave around during tea, any slippery oil I might spill on the floors or any firearms I might have lying around.
Of course, I invite everyone from Kendric House because how could I not? So counting the professor who surely must attend since his father was coming, four teenagers including Meredith who won’t be working in the shop on weekends. Llewellyn, Alex and me, that makes eight. Seven invited from The Glyn. Plus Raff, that’s Sixteen.
How has this little afternoon tea grown into a big party? And it’s cost me nearly ￡80. It’ll be worth it if the afternoon is a success but my savings, the slim amount set aside for rent on a new place to live, it’s fast trickling away. I’ll have to be extra frugal when the tour starts and squirrel away every penny.