Grace Forsythe leaned in before he could continue. “Are you not afraid that might be . . . a little too matcha?”
“Well, I don’t think so. It’s quite a complex ingredient. My feeling is that using it in different ways will bring different elements of the flavour out.”
Grace Forsythe patted him on the shoulder. “Too matcha information, old boy.”
Rosaline didn’t look up again until her layers were in the oven—everyone was pretty much at the same stage she was, apart from Nora, who seemed to have made three gigantic macarons; and Anvita, whose bench was covered in sandwich tins, mixing bowls, and layer after layer of as yet unovened cake.
“This is fine,” she was telling Colin Thrimp. “I know exactly what I’m doing. When it all comes together it’s going to—” Her elbow caught a mixing bowl, sending a spray of bright green buttercream up her apron and across the floor. “Still fine. I’ve got plenty.”
Colin put a hand to his headset. “Did we get that? Fabulous. Quick close-up of the spill, then get technical to deal with the slip hazard.”
Sensing she had about a three-minute window before she had to start on her macaron, Rosaline nipped over to Anvita’s workstation. “Are you . . . sure you’re okay?”
“Definitely,” she said, in a definitely-not voice. “This is all part of the plan. I just need to bake . . . um . . . seven more layers, two at a time, for about forty minutes each.”
“That’s three hours twenty minutes, just on the cakes.”
“Yep. Yep. Worked that out. As long as I do the macaron quickly, and perfectly, while batches two and three are in the oven, then I’ll have time to cool, ice, and decorate everything with”—absently, Anvita tasted the buttercream from her apron—“about thirty seconds to spare.”
This was exactly the sort of thing that Alain had told Rosaline not to do. And she went ahead and did it anyway. “Do you want to use my oven? I need a shelf for my third layer, but you can have the other one.”
Desperate hope flashed in Anvita’s eyes. “Really? Is that allowed?”
They both glanced towards Colin. “Oh no, it’s wonderful. Jennifer says the US market loves to see British people being hopelessly noncompetitive.”
“Anyone got a spare oven shelf?” Rosaline called out. “Anvita’s decided to do all the cake.”
Alain seemed absorbed in his matcha buttercream and didn’t even look up.
“Yeah, all right,” said Harry. “You can have mine in about twenty minutes.”
Nora, still waiting for her giant macaron to dry, was perched on her stool, slyly reading a book that appeared to be called The Playboy Prince’s Secret Baby. “You can have mine now,” she offered. “I think I’ll need it again in about an hour.”
Only slightly hindered by the camera crew, and Colin Thrimp’s multiple requests for retakes, Harry, Rosaline, and Anvita dispersed Anvita’s many layers across the ballroom. And then Rosaline got back to her macarons. Operation Stop Anvita Imploding had taken slightly more time than she’d budgeted for, but—to quote Anvita herself—it was fine. It was fine.
And it was, as it happened, mostly fine. The cake came together nicely and the marbling pretty much worked—although she’d been a little too heavy-handed with the black colouring so it was quite a dark night sky in the end. Her iridescent macaron planets, though, she was genuinely proud of. At one point, she’d been planning to do them to appropriate scale with an enormous Jupiter and a tiny Mercury, but when she’d tried it at home they’d cooked at different rates so while Earth had been about right, Saturn had been mush and Pluto was basically a bullet. Although that probably served it right for not being technically a planet. Rosaline was adding the popping-candy asteroid belt when she heard a despairing wail from Anvita’s direction.
Her cake, which about three seconds ago had been a baroque masterpiece in jewel tones, with a trail of macarons spiralling around it like a feather boa on a particularly delicious drag queen, was now listing heavily as both Anvita and Grace Forsythe did their best to support it without ending up elbow-deep in sponge and icing.
“Oh no,” cried Anvita. “This is a caketastrophe.”
Grace Forsythe tried to give her a reassuring look from the opposite side of a cake that was rapidly turning into a landslide. “It’s fine. I’ll just stand here holding it for the rest of my life. You can tell the judges I’m an especially elaborate fondant decoration. Which, now I think about it, is what my ex-girlfriend used to call me.”
“Five seconds,” called Marianne Wolvercote.
The entire top tier of Anvita’s baketacular swan-dived to the floor with a wet little splat.
“And time. Step away from your bakes.” Marianne Wolvercote shot a sharp look across the ballroom. “That includes you, Grace.”
“I’m not doing anything,” protested Grace Forsythe. “I’m resting my hands.”
“Please do as she says.” That was Colin Thrimp, fingers to his headset as usual. “And don’t shoot any messengers, but Jennifer asks me to remind you that it’s not too late to replace you with, and I’m sorry, these are Jennifer’s words, ‘some other cosy-voiced shitstain people vaguely remember from the ’90s.’”
Grace Forsythe snorted. “We both know that’s an empty threat. All the other cosy-voiced shitstains from the ’90s are either off their face on cocaine, in rehab, doing documentaries about getting off their faces on cocaine and going to rehab, or far too busy banging their much younger spouses.”
“It’s all right,” said Anvita. “I’m prepared. Let her die.”
“Anvita’s cake.” Grace Forsythe gazed solemnly at what was left of it. “In the short time we knew you, we loved a lifetime’s worth.”
She stepped back. And the whole thing slumped sideways like an Old West gunslinger with a bullet in the chest.
“This”—apparently the drama had been sufficient to summon Jennifer herself from wherever she’d been lurking during filming—“is going to get us renewed for another two series at least. I fucking love it.”
They arranged for Anvita to go first for judging and kept their comments short and positive. Because there was no need to go into detail when the feedback was “This would have been fine except it all fell on the floor.”
Alain was next, with an elegant and very green offering, decorated with dark chocolate, and dark chocolate macarons.
“There’s no denying,” said Wilfred Honey, having cut a perfect slice out of Alain’s perfect cake, “you can bake. You’ve got three even layers with a good filling of buttercream between them, and the flavours are balanced nicely. But it’s very”—and here he made a sad Granddad gesture—“expected. When we set this challenge, we were hoping to see a little more of who you are: and all you’ve shown us is what you can do.”
“I see.” Alain was frowning in a way that Rosaline had learned meant he was pissed off and trying not to show it. “Thank you.”
“Next week, if you get through,” continued Wilfred Honey, maintaining the polite fiction that Anvita wasn’t definitely going home, “try to have some fun wi’ it.”