A Spoonful of Sugar (8 page)

So, with our families taking up most of our time, Harry and I had hadn’t done any publicity so far, though June had been on Woman’s Hour and Wilf had been on the Radio One breakfast show.

But the constant stream of emails and messages didn’t prepare me for the reception that greeted us when we arrived back in Claddach for pastry week.

The hot weather had broken. Heavy purple clouds hung over the mountains, hiding their peaks, and the loch had turned from a deep blue to its customary inky black. Thunder rolled in the distance and the rain pounded down.

But the torrential downpour didn’t deter the paparazzi. Oh no. They were a determined bunch. As Harry and I got out of the car by the cafe, clutching our instructions for the day and me carrying my hospital notes – my due date was approaching and I didn’t want to take any chances – we were suddenly surrounded by people.

‘Harry, Esme, over here!’ they cried, blinding us with flashes from their cameras.

‘What do we do?’ I asked in a panic, shielding my bump and cowering by the car. Harry, luckily, took control. She stared fixedly at a ruddy-faced photographer whose eyes glazed over for a second. Then, with a blink, he stood up a bit straighter.

‘Amelia’s just arrived,’ he said loudly. ‘She’s down by the loch.’

Like a tide turning, the throng of paps spun round and headed towards the beach, leaving Harry and me alone.

I breathed out in relief.

‘That’s better,’ Harry said. ‘Imagine how awful it must be to have that all the time.’

I squinted through the rain at the shores of the water.

‘Is Amelia here?’ I said. ‘I can’t see her.’

Harry gave me a weary look.

‘Of course she’s not here,’ she said. ‘I just had to get them away from us, didn’t I?’

‘Ohhhhh,’ I said, understanding what she’d done. ‘I see.’

Together we ran – waddled – through the rain to the cafe where Mum and Suky exclaimed over how wet we were and fussed round us. Within seconds, I was sitting in a make-up chair, my hair being towelled off and a cup of tea and a plate of biscuits by my side. Harry may not be enjoying her fifteen minutes, but there were definite perks to being famous, even if it was only temporary.

June and Wilf were in the cafe too. Like Amelia, June seemed to be a bit more glamorous this weekend. She was wearing cropped beige trousers and a pretty broderie anglaise blouse. She’d had her hair cut into a more modern style and had pink streaks put in it. Wilf looked exactly the same.

‘Ready for pastry week?’ he asked, bounding over and stealing a biscuit from my plate.

‘As I’ll ever be,’ I said gloomily. But it was fake gloom. Harry had given me an intensive week of tuition and I was confident I’d mastered the basics of every kind of pastry. I was ready for whatever they threw at me – and I’d prepared a three-tier pie for the challenge that I was very pleased with.

Make-up done, we all trooped to the marquee under golf umbrellas. Lizzie greeted us all with a smile, but Peter barely acknowledged us. He was deep in conversation with a man in a suit, who I thought was part of the production company. I wondered if they were talking about Amelia, so I zoned in to their conversation.

‘ … silly schoolgirl,’ Peter said.

The suited man nodded.

‘That’s true, but her dad runs the company so we need to show willing.’

Peter sighed heavily.

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘I’ll have her as a guest spot on my next series. But not every episode.’

The man in the suit shook Peter’s hand with vigour and dashed off out of the tent.

I chewed my lip thoughtfully. It seemed things hadn’t worked out that badly for Amelia after all. Maybe she’d dropped the caramel on her own head. No, surely not?

‘Welcome to pastry week,’ Lizzie said, startling me out of my thoughts.

‘For today’s first challenge, we’d like you to make twelve chocolate éclairs,’ Peter said.

I resisted the temptation to punch the air. Yes! Harry and I had practised these and I was pretty confident I could pull them off. Up at the front, Harry turned to me and grinned, and I gave her a thumbs-up. Bring on the éclairs, I thought. I may not be here entirely through my own merits but I was going to prove I deserved my spot in this round.

And do you know what? I really did. For once, everything went perfectly. My choux pastry came together like a dream. Poor Wilf had a nightmare and ended up with a sticky goo that he came over to show me, chuckling ruefully.

‘Lucky it wasn’t this that landed on Amelia’s head,’ he said to me, lifting the gluey dough up with a spoon so I could fully appreciate how awful it was. ‘She’d never have got this off.’

I grinned.

‘You’re going to have to start again,’ I said. ‘Do you have time?’

Wilf checked his watch and nodded.

‘Oh I reckon so,’ he said, not at all bothered by his baking disaster. ‘Yours looks amazing by the way.’

I was piping my pastry into éclair shapes on the baking tray.
‘They’re not bad, are they?’ I said, feeling a bit smug. ‘Harry had an inkling we’d get éclairs this week so she made me practice.’

‘Ooh careful,’ said Wilf. ‘Pride comes before a fall here.’

I paused in my piping and looked at him.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

Wilf came closer to me and spoke quietly.

‘Well, Amelia was boasting about her bakes and she was taken out,’ he said, his eyes wide.

‘No,’ I scoffed. ‘I know she’s been saying she doesn’t feel safe but that’s just to get attention, surely?’

Wilf made a face that said he wasn’t convinced.

‘She doesn’t really mean
Britain Bakes
is dangerous,’ I said, feeling slightly less sure of myself. ‘It was an accident.’

Wilf pursed his lips.

‘And Ronald?’

‘Coincidence,’ I said firmly. ‘Unlucky coincidence. Whatever the opposite of serendipity is.’

‘If you’re sure,’ Wilf said, giving his disastrous choux pastry another stir. ‘But all I’m saying is: watch your back.’

I rolled my eyes at him and he smirked at me as he went back to his bench to start all over again.

I didn’t need to watch anything, I thought, carefully putting my éclairs in the oven. It was fine. Amelia was just using her accident to further her career and get herself on Peter’s show.

In fact, I forgot all about Wilf’s words of doom while I piped cream into my crisp, evenly brown éclairs, and dipped them in chocolate icing. They were the best things I’d ever made, I thought proudly. And I hoped the judges thought so too.

Fourteen

To my surprise, the judges did.

‘These are terrific,’ Lizzie said, munching happily. ‘You’ve got the right amount of cream and icing, and they’re perfectly baked.’

I smiled in delight. Maybe I had inherited the family talent for baking after all.

‘Well done,’ Peter said grudgingly. I fought the urge to scowl at him. He was such a misery guts.

Of course, Harry’s éclairs were voted best of the bunch, while June’s were also gorgeous. Wilf’s weren’t great. His second attempt at the dough had also been too runny, and he’d ended up with skinny little éclairs that were, according to Lizzie, ‘too chewy’.

‘You’ve made a right mess of those,’ Peter told him. Wilf looked glum and I felt sorry for him. Hopefully he’d pull it out of the bag in the next challenge. Although, I thought suddenly, my competitive nature finally getting into gear, if he did, then I’d probably be the one to go home this week. With the final round in sight – just two weeks away – I discovered I actually really, really wanted to make it to the end.

That was a surprise. I decided to spend our lunch break studying my notes and recipes for this afternoon’s test – pies.

We all sat together in the cafe for lunch, but instead of joining in the chatter, I read and re-read everything I’d brought with me. This next challenge was to make a three-tiered pie – a celebration pie. Jamie was thrilled with the very idea and had spent all week eagerly suggesting ideas and then gobbling them up as fast as I could make them. I’d eventually decided on a three-course-dinner pie. My smallest tier was a starter – a feta and spinach parcel sprinkled with sesame – then the main course was a traditional chicken and mushroom pie, and pudding, the biggest tier on the bottom, was a treacle tart. Apart from the timings, it was all pretty straightforward and once again I was worried I’d gone too simple.

Harry was making three kinds of fruit pies, each with a different fancy crust. June was doing pies for three occasions – Christmas, Easter and Halloween. And Wilf’s was genius. He was doing breakfast, lunch and dinner in pie form. Sausage, bacon and egg on one tier, a layer of Cornish pasty for lunch in the middle, and a coconut chicken curry pot pie on the bottom. It was a family recipe, passed down from his Jamaican mum and he was very secretive about it.

‘I’m not saying anything,’ he teased Harry as she asked him about it. ‘Ask June about hers.’

Frustrated, Harry turned her attention to June, who was more than pleased to chat,

‘I’ve got pie tins that belonged to my grandmother,’ she said. ‘They’re iron. Very heavy – you wouldn’t want to drop them. They’d cost a fortune if you bought them nowadays.’

‘How lovely,’ Harry said. ‘I’m using one of my mum’s recipes, too.’

I was a bit cross I hadn’t thought of doing that, but I pretended not to hear their conversation, as I pored over my notes, once again convinced that I’d be going home for good at the end of the day.

Actually, things didn’t go too badly to begin with. I started out making my pastry. All three of mine had the same crust, which is why I was worried I’d over-simplified things. Everyone else was making three different types of pastry so it seemed I was right to be concerned, but it was too late to change it now. I simply had to make sure it was the best it could be.

Like this morning, everything went well. I put my pastry in the fridge to chill and started making my fillings. I was frying off my chicken when Harry appeared at my side.

‘I’ve forgotten my sodding heart-shaped cutter,’ she hissed. One of her pies was filled with strawberries. Its lid was made out of overlapping hearts cut from the pastry and sprinkled with pink sugar – which looked amazing and which would obviously be a complete nightmare to do if she had to cut each tiny heart by hand.

‘You can get it,’ I said under my breath. ‘Just do it subtly.’

‘I can’t do it subtly,’ Harry said, nodding back to her bench where Peter was peering at her chopped-up apples. ‘Because sodding Peter thought he was helping and he unpacked my bag for me. He knows there’s nothing else in it.’

I smiled at her.

‘Want me to get it?’ I asked.

Harry looked annoyed.

‘Well, obviously,’ she said.

‘Say please,’ I said.

‘Oh for god’s sake,’ said Harry. ‘I’ll get it myself, I just need your bag.’

I giggled and picked up my enormous canvas bag, which was tucked under my bench, and delved inside.

‘Yes, I picked up your heart-shaped cutter,’ I said more loudly. ‘It’s in here somewhere.’

Inside the bag, I waggled my fingers and felt the slight shudder as the magic worked and my hand closed round the cutter. I pulled it out and gave it to Harry. She gave me an affectionate punch – at least, I thought it was affectionate – and went back to her workbench, glancing at June as she went by. She’d filled one of her grandmother’s tins, and the others lay on her bench waiting for their pastry.

I carried on cooking my chicken, trying not to look at Wilf. He was creating something of a masterpiece, arranging his bacon, eggs and sausages inside his breakfast pie. I knew he was a better baker than me and that he should really make the final three but I still felt a flutter of competitiveness inside.

‘How are you getting on?’ Peter and Lizzie were on the prowl and had come to see what I was up to.

I ran through my pies and winced as Peter frowned.

‘Same pastry for each one?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said, my chin lifted in defiance. ‘But it’s really good pastry.’

He gave me a brief, humourless smile. ‘It had better be,’ he said.

They went to move on to see what Wilf was doing, but as they turned to go, there was a huge clatter, like the clang of a gong.

We all whirled round, to see June flat out on the floor, one of her grandmother’s tins spinning next to her. She was clutching her foot, which I could see was already turning purple and swelling furiously.

‘Oh Lord,’ said Lizzie, rushing to June’s side and kneeling down – the woman was amazingly flexible for her age. ‘What happened?’

‘I picked up my tin,’ June said through gritted teeth. ‘But it was all greasy on the outside and it slipped through my fingers onto my blasted foot. Oh it hurts, it hurts, it hurts.’

Feeling useless, I watched as Harry dashed to the freezer and pulled out a bag of ice. She wrapped it in a tea towel and handed it to Lizzie, who very gently put it on June’s sore foot.

Wilf nodded in a resigned way.

‘Dangerous,’ he said to me, as though he’d known it all along. Then he shouted over to Lizzie.

‘I’ll go and get Portia,’ he said.

Fifteen

Portia came into the marquee at a gallop, her face flushed. She was followed by Wilf, then her two assistants, who she was barking orders at over her shoulder, her blonde hair swishing madly.

‘Get Lorraine on the phone,’ she was saying. ‘She’ll bloody love this.’

Her face softened as she saw June, still on the floor but now with a cushion under her head, and with Lizzie by her side.

‘Oh heck,’ she said. ‘Are you okay?’

June managed a brave smile.

‘I’m hanging in there, pet,’ she said.

‘What happened?’ Portia asked.

We all looked at June.

‘So silly,’ she said. ‘I must have covered the outside of the tin with butter when I greased the inside. It was slippery when I picked it up so I dropped it on to my foot.’

There was a pause as we all thought about what she’d said.

‘You think YOU covered the outside of the tin?’ said Wilf pointedly. ‘Deliberately?’

‘No,’ said June. ‘Not deliberately. Why would I grease the outside of my tin? It’s the inside that needs greasing.’