Taking a deep breath, Audrey risked a look around the ballroom. If nothing else, the production team must have been getting exactly what they hoped for out of this little stunt, because the entire cast were emoting their backsides off. Alanis, who clearly knew what kind of meme she wanted to be, was doing a full-on reaction gif at the recipe, while behind her the resident hipster was stroking his goatee with consternation.
Seeing this much of what went on in the ballroom was distractingly interesting. At home you only got to see the edited highlights, the parts that were cool or shocking or included mild innuendoes. Having the massive multitudinous but occasionally tedious complexity of it all going on around her was, to Audrey’s media-saturated brain, like being Charlie in the Chocolate Factory. Or, perhaps more accurately, like being Mike Teevee.
It was also not what she was here for. She was here for the baking, and with a strength of will she was slightly too proud to be proud of, she turned her attention back to her workstation.
They’d been given too much of everything, she was sure of that. A whole carton of eggs. A whole pint of milk. More flour and sugar than anybody could have a realistic use for. She preheated the oven to a hundred and seventy degrees. Then she greased and lined her cake tins and started measuring out what felt like—no, what she wassurewere—realistic amounts of the various ingredients into a bowl.
The trick, she kept very firmly reminding herself, was that therewereno tricks. It was a cake. A cake that anybody who made cakes had made a hundred times. She mixed up her batter, transferred it into the tins, whacked the tins in the ovens for twenty minutes, and moved on to her buttercream. Once the icing sugar had been smoothly beaten into the butter, she allowed herself another look around at the competition.
Doris seemed to be sailing through, as somebody who’d been doing this kind of thing for the best part of a century naturally would. Alanis was struggling slightly, probably more from nerves than from lack of skill, and Audrey wondered if it had been entirely fair to put someone quite that young through something quite this stressful. At the back of the ballroom, a man Audrey hadn’t seen before was beating his own buttercream with such intense Dad energy that Audrey almost laughed. Instead, she just smiled at him, and he smiled back.
Then her timer beeped, and she had to get back to work.
In the end, as she brought her cake up to rest on the display table at the front of the hall, she thought she’d done pretty well. Trouble was, so had everybody else. Rug-pullingly terse recipe aside, the Victoria spongehadbeen an easy start. Some looked a little over, some a little under, but mostly they’d all come out okay. One particularly bold baker had topped their offering with extra buttercream rather than dusting it with icing sugar, and Audrey strongly suspected that would count against them with the judges.
It did.
* * *
“All I’m saying,” Joshua with the hipster goatee explained in his post-blind-bake interview, “is that what the recipe said wasmake a Victoria sponge. It didn’t saymake a Victoria sponge uncreatively.”
Despite the terrible crime of a nontraditional topping, Joshua’s cake hadn’t come in last. That honour had been reserved for Gerald, the man Audrey had seen spilling ketchup on himself that morning and who had proven to be exactly as ketchup spilling in the ballroom as he was at breakfast.
“Overall,” he was saying in a cut-glass accent that Audrey made at least a token attempt not to judge him for, “I actually think I did pretty dashed well. There was just that teeny-tiny detail of not putting any, you know, sugar into it. I thought I had. I definitelymeantto. Somehow. On the day.” He threw his hands in the air. “You know. Is what it is.”
By contrast, Audrey’s sponge had been well received. Just not as well received as Doris’s, which had indeed been honed to perfection over decades of mothering, grandmothering, and great-grandmothering. Still, it had been a non-embarrassing start and Audrey tentatively discarded her last concerns about being the joke contestant.
She was just wandering down the hill away from the ballroom when she spotted Alanis sitting under a tree facing determinedly away from the house. From her body language, Audrey was fifty-fifty at best on whether she just wanted to be left alone. But since in her experience even if somebodydidwant to be left alone, there was yet another fifty-fifty question to ask about whether theyshouldbe, she went over to check.
“Hi,” she tried in her best not-intruding-just-passing voice.
Alanis looked up. She definitely wasn’t crying, but she definitely had been. “Hi. How’re you?”
“Okay.” Deciding that in this case valour was the better part of discretion, Audrey sat down next to her, at kind of a forty-five-degree angle around the base of the tree. “Tough start?”
It seemed, briefly, like Alanis wasn’t going to admit it. But then she hugged her knees to her chest and said, “It was just sohard. I didn’t expect it to be that hard. And I’ve been baking since I was a kid—”
“You know you’re kind of still a kid?”
In a paradoxical attempt to protest the accusation of kiddishness, Alanis stuck her tongue out. “All right then, I’ve been baking since I wasreally small. So I thought I’d at least be fine on week one, but then they didn’t give us any instructions and I didn’t know what to do and…”
Shuffling closer, Audrey put an arm around Alanis’s shoulder and let her have another little cry. “And you did fine.”
“Only because other people did worse.”
This felt like a moment that called for wisdom, for Audrey to reach deep into her well of stored experiences and pluck out some pearls of advice that Alanis could treasure for the rest of her life. “I think,” she tried, “that other people doing worse is often what success looks like.”
Alanis seemed unpearled by this wisdom. “Mr. Reynolds would say that’s not very growth mindset of you.”
“From context, I’m assuming not-very-growth-mindset is something Idon’twant to be?”
“You don’t have to be better than other people,” Alanis seemed to be quoting, “you have to be better than you were yesterday.”
Audrey considered this. It was the kind of advice she saw the value in but felt was less universal than its peddlers claimed. “I don’t think that applies in a literal competition.”
“I just wanted to do well.”
“And you will. You’ve got eight whole weeks ahead of you. You can pull it back tomorrow.”
