I huffed at him, but he just smirked and winked at me over his sunglasses. I was going to have to strategize. Tiramisu was simple enough that Hunter only needed to copy me, and then he would make the dish!
I surveyed my ingredients. The little farmers market did not have ladyfingers. We would have to bake our own. Hunter could sit over there and copy me, but he didn’t have a stand mixer, a baking sheet, or a pastry bag and piping tip.
Tiramisu didn’t actually take that long to cook, once you had the ladyfingers and your espresso made. I gave a silent thank-you to Hazel for making me pack a French press.
Once my coffee was brewing, I thought about what to make to throw Hunter off the trail. I went down to the farmers’ table to pick up more ingredients, and he raced after me.
I bit down a laugh as I selected potatoes and celery.
“You need these turnips for that dessert, too, don’t you?” Ernest asked loudly, winking at me. He knew what I was up to.
“Shh!” I said exaggeratedly.
Hunter grabbed his own set of vegetables while I went back to my table, snickering to myself as I peeled the potatoes, and pretended to add them to my ladyfinger batter. Hunter was blatantly copying me. He was mixing up the batter for the ladyfingers by hand, and I was sure that he had added too much baking soda in addition to the raw potatoes.
Hunter is so going down!
54
Hunter
Idid not have a potato shredder, so I had had to resort to cutting them into tiny little slivers with a knife.
“This doesn’t feel right,” I said to myself.
In the crash cooking class my brothers had given me, we hadn’t covered tiramisu. We had baked cookies, however. I had burned them, of course, but they didn’t have any potatoes or turnips in them.
Maybe these oblong Italian cookies are different.
I glanced over at what Meg was doing. She was separating her eggs, and it appeared that she was putting them in the bowl with the celery.
Fuck.
I hated cooking, and I especially hated baking.
No matter—I had my secret weapon. And as long as the dish was cooked, it would be fine, right?
“Thirty minutes!” Sadie called out.
Shoot. Meg’s cookies were already in the oven, but I didn’t even have my batter done.
“Fuck it,” I said, throwing in a few handfuls of flour, some sugar, and the potatoes into a bowl and stirring it around.
I shuffled through the box of junk my brothers had brought me. I did not have a pan. I did have Parker’s science beakers, so I distributed the batter into five of them and stuck them in the oven.
I carefully watched what Meg was doing. She had several bowls out that she was shuffling around on her station. She poured some rum into several of them.
I bet she’s trying to trick me, I decided.I bet you don’t need to have all those little bowls of different eggs.I threw all my eggs in a bowl with some sugar and cognac and mixed it up by hand.
At least I have a coffeepot.I put the coffee on to brew.
“I think your beakers are on fire,” Meg informed me with a snicker.
I swore, opening the oven. The cookies smelled disgusting. I swore again. “Hey, Meg?”
“No.”
“You don’t even know what I was going to ask!”
