Marianne Wolvercote prowled forward, looking especially in need of a cigarette holder. “Today’s blind bake is a savoury recipe that requires a delicate touch, a mastery of choux pastry—”
“And a willingness,” added Grace Forsythe, “to be just a little bit cheesy.”
“I want you,” continued Marianne Wolvercote, “to make twenty-eight perfectly formed, identical gougères. They’re a personal favourite, so don’t disappoint me.”
Grace Forsythe bounced on the balls of her feet. “You have one hour. On the count of three. Three, darlings.”
Okay, this could have been a lot worse. Rosaline had been worried they’d ask her to make something fiddly with layers, and she’d never done well at fiddly with layers. There were always so many elements that one of them was bound to go wrong—especially with time pressure—and there she’d be with a runny crème pat or fruit in the wrong place and Marianne Wolvercote saying something like, “This lacks both joy and finesse.”
Anyway. Her joyless pudding was in the past. Her future lay in making twenty-eight cheesy buns from a recipe that she knew, without even looking at it, would start with the line “Make choux pastry.”
“Preheat oven to a high temperature,” said the recipe.
Dammit.
“Make choux pastry,” it continued.
Ha.
Rosaline awarded herself an A-minus for effort. And got on with the choux.
It wasn’t anybody’s favourite pastry because it was tricky to work with and the bake-verse was filled with weird myths about how you knew it was cooked properly. But she and Amelie had tried to make profiteroles once, and while the bake had gone horrendously badly, they’d had a lot of fun with the piping bags and eaten left-over crème pat straight from the spoon.
Once the dough started pulling away from the sides of the pan, Rosaline plopped it into a bowl and tried to remember what you did with the eggs.
“I’m trying to remember,” she told a hovering camera without being prompted, “what you do with the eggs. I think if you put them in while it’s too hot, they’ll cook and then you’re making . . . scrambled egg buns. When I made choux with my daughter, we squished it until it cooled, but honestly, that might just be because she likes squishing things, and I think that did overagitate the dough. And I definitely don’t want my choux to be agitated. I want it to be”—she was doing hand gestures again—“mellow and friendly. The kind of dough you could go for a drink with.”
Rosaline prodded tentatively at her choux-to-be. It was not exactly hot but not exactly cool, and she had no idea what that meant, so she decided to wait before chucking eggs in it. And somehow, waiting and trusting her instincts had stopped being the most terrifying thing in the universe.
It seemed impossible, but had she actually got used to the ballroom? It still didn’t feel like her own kitchen because it was a giant oak-panelled room in a stately home full of TV cameras, but her workstation had grown familiar to her as the weeks had passed. As had the other contestants: Nora with her incessant narration, Alain with his obsessive focus, Anvita’s tendency towards chaos, and Harry’s painstaking care that sometimes disintegrated into paralysis.
And in two weeks it would all be over. Or one week. Or, if things went very badly, zero weeks. It was probably a bit late in the game to work out that she’d miss it. The place and the people and even the challenges. Because even when she fucked them up abominably and made a leche that wouldn’t dulce or a joyless pudding, she was still baking. And she loved baking and the show made that okay.
Made it into something that millions of people shared and appreciated and celebrated.
Instead of something she did because she couldn’t be a doctor.
It had been a fairly speedy challenge and a fairly brisk judging—Rosaline thought the production company might have been going easy on them because the next day’s baketacular was probably going to be gruelling. She hadn’t won but she hadn’t lost—that misfortune having fallen on Anvita, who had definitely put her eggs in too early. Nora and Harry had both done well, Nora just claiming the top spot with a combination of long-honed technical skills and giving no fucks.
“I can’t be doing with patisserie,” she told Colin Thrimp. “It’s just regular baking but smaller. And who wants less of something nice?”
Harry, meanwhile, was left explaining his unexpected success to an un-Thrimped camera crew. “When they said what the challenge was, I hadn’t got a”—the pause of someone trying not to fuck all over the BBC—“bloomin’ clue. But it turns out, I make ’em all the time. Only in my house, we don’t call ’em gougères. We call ’em cheesy bites.”
Interviews concluded, they were left milling around on the lawn, everyone aware that it was slightly too early to start drinking and not quite willing to be the first to do it anyway. Detaching herself like the man with no name at the end of a Western, Anvita wandered off and sat down under a tree, staring moodily over the grounds.
“She’s having a bit of a time, ain’t she?” said Harry.
Nora made the sort of noise your gran makes when you fall over and scrape your knee. “Poor dear. It’s tough for you young things. She’ll be okay, though. Most people are.”
“I’m sure she will,” offered Rosaline. “But if the way she’s feeling now is anything like I was feeling last week, then it super sucks.”
Alain’s hands landed gently on Rosaline’s shoulders, and she half turned so he could whisper in her ear. “I’m quite disappointed as well. I think I might need to head back to the Lodge and spend some quality time with my recipes.”
“Oh.” She wasn’t entirely sure what Alain had to be disappointed about given that he’d done about as well as her and significantly better than Anvita. “Um, okay?”
“I’ll see you later?” Without waiting for a reply, he strode off—his long legs carrying him swiftly across the lawn and away.
“I think,” announced Nora, “I’m going to take advantage of this lovely afternoon to sit on a bench with a glass of lemonade and finish my book. The Greek billionaire has just offered the virgin cellist a very saucy proposal, so I think we’re about to get to the good bits.”
While Rosaline was still processing this, Harry asked, “How many of them books you read, anyway?”
“About one a week for the last fifty years.”
Rosaline couldn’t quite help doing the maths. “That’s two and a half thousand books.”
“Yes, my husband’s forever making bookshelves. I should probably give them to charity, but it’s a collection now.”
“Well”—Harry gave an easygoing shrug—“don’t let us keep you from your billionaire.”
Nora grinned. “Wild horses couldn’t. You certainly can’t.”
That left Harry and Rosaline alone in front of the hotel, watching Anvita being sad at a distance.
“It’s a bit weird having all this time, init?” remarked Harry. “I feel like I should do something about Anvita, but I reckon I’ll bollocks it up.”
“I’m sure she’ll be glad to know we care.”