“You could string her along long enough to beat the Holbrooks and get my brothers off our case.”
“That sounds like dealing with the devil. Besides, I already am making enough deals with evil spirits. I have all that Great Christmas Bake-off nonsense, which I know is going to come back and bite me.”
*
As I pulledup in front of my tower and handed the keys to the valet, I remembered how muchThe Great Christmas Bake-Offwas already ruining my life. When I walked into the lobby, it looked like a storage facility. Six figures’ worth of Christmas decorations filled the space. Holly was happily skipping through the maze of boxes like a demented ballerina inTheNutcracker.
“What the hell?” I growled. People were going to think my company was going out of business.
Holly stopped and blinked at me, and Rudolph ran over to greet me. I picked him up and walked over to her. Holly pulled a wad of receipts and my credit card out of her coat pocket and handed them to me. I took them silently out of her hand.
“Merry Christmas?” she said sheepishly.
15
Holly
Ihadn’t had a lot of time to go through the decorations the night before. Owen, a scowl firmly on his face, had picked up the dog and disappeared upstairs. After a full day of shopping, I didn't have the energy to go through each box. Instead, I sat in bed and ate a bowl of peppermint ice cream and chatted with my fans on Instagram while old holiday cartoons played on my laptop.
The next morning, I had a sugar hangover. I sucked down coffee while Zane clipped on my microphone.
“Today,” Anastasia said after the judges had all sat at the reclaimed-wood table, “is the Santa's cookie challenge. It's not Christmas without Christmas cookies. And we have the queen of Christmas cookies, Chloe from the Grey Dove Bistro, here as a guest judge. Chloe, do you have tips about cookies that could help the contestants?”
“I love a good sugar cookie!” Chloe said. “At the Grey Dove Bistro, we make several thousand cookies and decorate them by hand every day for Greyson Hotel Group to give as welcome gifts to patrons. Remember to keep the dough cold. A steady hand while decorating is also important. Also, I feel like there's no such thing as a bad cookie. Good luck!”
I was excited for this challenge and knew exactly what I was going to make: my grandmother's famous sugar cookies. They were light and fluffy and practically melted in your mouth. I would frost them with a layer of buttercream and a sprinkle of rock sugar. They were my favorite Christmas treats in the world, and I was determined that my baking would bring Owen some Christmas cheer. Who in the world hated Christmas and baked goods? No one, that's who. Owen just needed someone to remind him what the holiday was all about.
These cookies were sweet, but everyone I fed them to said they were addicting. The buttercream didn't use all that much sugar, and it tempered the sugar cookie dough. Even Morticia liked them, though she always requested Halloween shapes.
I was making candy canes, stars, bells, Christmas trees, stockings, and snowmen. The cookies were tasty, but I was worried that they wouldn't be enough to win. I chewed on my lip and looked around in the pantry. I didn't want my dish to be a sad plate of a few cookies. It needed to be a true platter with a mound of cookies.
Last Valentine's Day, I had made cookie sandwiches with this recipe. Maybe I could do something similar for Christmas and have a beautiful plate. For Valentine’s Day, I had used raspberry jam in the middle and either frosted the top piece, left it plan with a sprinkling of colored sugar, or drizzled ganache over it.
For this challenge, I decided to do all of the above and filled my basket with ingredients then toted everything back to my station. These sugar cookies seemed simple, but they did take a while to make. There was a lot of waiting—waiting for the dough to chill, waiting for the cookies to bake, waiting for the pans to cool.
Since the dough needed to be good and cold, I made it first. The dough wasn’t that difficult to make. Cream the cold butter and the sugar, add the salt, flour, and baking powder then the eggs. When I was done, I had a buttery-colored plank of dough. I put it in the freezer to chill then set about making the filling.
Instead of raspberry jam, I reduced raspberries to a rich red syrup. I also made an orange reduction, zesting several organic oranges and squeezing the juice. I didn't add any sugar. I wanted the tang to contrast against the sugar cookie. Since it was Christmas and I wanted to have something green, too, I made the final reduction out of key limes. I strained all three fruity sauces and set them aside to cool.
The dough was finally cold. I split it into portions and rolled the first ball out on the parchment paper.
To make the sandwiches, I cut out a large star and cut a smaller star out of the middle of it for the top of the sandwich so you could see the filling inside. I repeated this for the other shapes like the Christmas trees and the bells. After I had a nice set of tops, I peeled the remaining dough off the parchment paper and put in in the fridge to cool again. When I got back to my station, a cookie tray had appeared next to my rolling pin. I looked at it suspiciously.
“I had to borrow your cookie sheet for a second,” Amber said innocently.
“Uh-huh.” After all her accusations of me trying to steal Owen, I didn't trust her. I inspected the sheet and all the cookies I had rolled out. The cookie sheet was the kind I preferred, constructed of two pieces of metal with an air pocket sandwiched between. Itseemedfine. I checked my oven temperature then took out two more cookie sheets and slid the pieces of parchment paper onto them. I put them in the oven and set a timer.
I was rolling out the next set of cookies when a whistling sound came out of the oven. Zane and another camera guy raced over, hoping to capture the drama.
“It's nothing. Sometimes ovens make noises,” I assured them.
Bang!I was cut off when an explosion came from the oven.
“What in the world!” I raced to open it. “My cookies!”
They were ruined. Somehow, one of the cookie sheets had literally exploded. The cookies had been knocked off in the carnage and were smoldering at the bottom of the oven. Struggling not to cry, I turned off the oven and grabbed an oven mitt. Anastasia came over with a fire extinguisher.
“What happened? I thought baking was supposed to be safe!” she exclaimed.
