Read Meet Me at the Cupcake Café Online
Authors: Jenny Colgan
Meet Me at the Cupcake Café
‘She is very, very funny’
Express
‘A delicious comedy’
Red
‘A Jenny Colgan novel is as essential for a week in the sun as Alka Seltzer, aftersun and far too many pairs of sandals’
Heat
‘Fast-paced, funny, poignant and well observed’
Daily Mail
‘Hugely entertaining and very funny’
Cosmopolitan
‘A funny, clever page-turner’
Closer
‘Chick-lit with an ethical kick’
Mirror
‘A quirky tale of love, work and the meaning of life’
Company
‘A smart, witty love story’
Observer
‘Full of laugh-out-loud observations … utterly unputdownable’
Woman
‘A chick-lit writer with a difference … never scared to try something different, Colgan always pulls it off’
Image
‘A Colgan novel is like listening to your best pal, souped up on vino, spilling the latest gossip – entertaining, dramatic and frequently hilarious’
Daily Record
‘An entertaining read’
Sunday Express
‘The perfect summer sunbather, easy to read,
packed with gags and truths’
Irish News
Amanda’s Wedding
Talking to Addison
Looking for Andrew McCarthy
Working Wonders
Do You Remember the First Time?
Where Have All the Boys Gone?
West End Girls
Operation Sunshine
Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend
The Good, the Bad and the Dumped
Published by Hachette Digital
ISBN: 978-0-748-12195-3
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © Jenny Colgan 2011
‘Baking your first cupcake’ piece,
copyright © The Caked Crusader 2011
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
Hachette Digital
Little, Brown Book Group
100 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DY
Contents
Baking your first cupcake by The Caked Crusader
Royal Wedding Street Party Red, White and Blue Cupcakes
Diamonds are A Girl’s Best Friend
The Good, The Bad And The Dumped
To anyone who’s ever licked the spoon.
Special thanks to Ali Gunn and Jo Dickinson. Also to Ursula Mackenzie, David Shelley, Manpreet Grewal, Tamsin Kitson, Kate Webster, Rob Manser, Frances Doyle, Adrian Foxman, Andy Coles, Fabia Ma, Sara Talbot, Robert Mackenzie, Gill Midgley, Alan Scollan, Nick Hammick, Andrew Hally, Alison Emery, Richard Barker, Nigel Andrews, and all the amazing team at Little, Brown, ‘2010 publisher of the year’. Thanks to Deborah Adams for the copy-edit.
Also: the very wonderful Caked Crusader, whose true identity must NEVER be uncovered, at
www.thecakedcrusader.blogspot.com;
Patisserie Zambetti, whose entire repertoire I have repeatedly worked through with unashamed gusto and who are never short of a friendly smile, a cup of coffee and a vanilla slice (sorry,
millefeuille
) on a rainy morning. Geri and Marina, Mads for that lunch, Lise, world’s best workmate; the board, as ever, and assorted Warings, Dingles, Lee-Elliotts and McCarthys for your kindnesses and friendship. And to Mr B and my three wee Bs: I love you to pieces and think you are all totally tremendous in every way. But no, you can’t have another cake; you’ll spoil your dinner. Not even you, big yin.
I left home just before my seventeenth birthday and the idea of learning to cook or bake before I left would have been greeted with a typically teenage shrug. I had been a miserably fussy eater as a child – I wouldn’t even eat cheesecake – and I spent my student years living off the traditional diet of crisps, beans, chilli and snakebite.
When I was twenty-one, I had a boyfriend who was aghast that I couldn’t actually cook
at all
, and who taught me how to make my first white sauce out of sheer exasperation. After that, it was one step forward, two steps back: the onion soup where I didn’t realize you had to do anything to the onions before you stuck them in some boiling water; the lemon cake where too much bicarbonate of soda reacted with the acid of the lemons to make something akin to the chemical composition of chalk; and – an ongoing problem – I now have about nine thousand discarded recipes for scones because no matter whether I use tonic water, or whisked milk, or room temperature this and that, some round, hard, tasteless discs always end up sitting at the bottom of the tray. My mum, a fantastic baker and scone-maker who used to plonk me on the kitchen cabinets and let me lick the mixer arms whilst she made fairy cakes, says I should give up on the scones and just use the shop-bought mix, even she does these days. But I refuse to let it go.
Anyway. Then I had children, and in a desperate desire to make sure they didn’t have to suffer the miserable indignities of being the child who doesn’t eat anything, I wanted to give them the broadest repertoire of tastes possible. Which also, of course, meant learning to cook.
To some people, cooking is an innate gift. My sister-in-law is an extraordinary cook. Give her ten minutes in a kitchen and she will conjure up something heavenly out of thin air, tasting and testing and altering as she goes along. I will never be like that. I still get upset when my husband serves beetroot.
*
But I can, finally, just about make good, wholesome food for my family (we’ll just ignore that whole fish guts incident for now), and seeing as I was in the kitchen anyway, I found that if you’ve got a mixer, it actually doesn’t take terribly long to rustle up a chocolate sponge or some peanut-butter cookies. I’m a staunch believer in Jamie Oliver’s mantra of ‘it doesn’t matter what you eat; just make sure it has as few ingredients as possible’, and I realise that even when I think my life is hectic, half an hour is enough to grab some flour, sugar, butter and an egg, and to make up a batch of the most flexible recipe of all – the cupcake – and look like a proper Nigella (without, alas, the lustrous locks or the resplendent bosom) whilst I’m at it. Of course, the children take it totally for granted and loudly ask what they are having today, and argue over whose turn it is to use the mixer, just like we did, but that’s all right. I’m doing it because I enjoy it.
And suddenly it seemed like I wasn’t alone. Suddenly, cupcake cafés started springing up everywhere, and I was absolutely gripped by
The Great British Bake-Off
on telly. There’s even an annual cupcake festival:
www.cupcakecamplondon.co.uk
. And Issy’s story here was inspired by all of that and, in the end, by the simple desire to make something sweet for the people you love.
I hope you like it too – whether you bake already, or if you think one day that you’d like to (see the Caked Crusader’s fantastic beginner’s guide at the back of the book), or if you think, ‘totally, no way, would I ever get sucked into that’, as I did, once upon a time, or are just a contented consumer. Come, pull up a chair …
Very warmest wishes,
Jenny
I have successfully tested all the recipes in this book (NB, for cooking times please be aware that I don’t use a fan oven) and they’re all yummy. Except for Caroline’s Bran and Carrot Cupcake Surprise. There, you’re on your own. Also, please note that Grampa Joe’s recipes are imperial and Issy’s are metric. Caroline works in ‘cups’. She’s like that.
JC x x