“Mainly the late night.”
I yawned. “If it had been any other wedding, I would never have scheduled a tasting session while everyone was hungover after a festival.”
Not to mention that if it were any other wedding, we wouldn’t even need to do a supplemental cake tasting, because Sophie had the capacity to make a wedding cake to feed a thousand people. But apparently there were going to be a hundred thousand people at Meg and Hunter’s wedding. And they had been promised cake.
“Yum, cake!” Meg said.
“How are you not asleep?”
“I’ve been up all night,” she informed me. “After I eat cake, I’m going to bed for the rest of the day.”
“Lucky,” I said. “I’m planning a wedding.”
“I know!” Meg said gleefully. “So glad it’s not me.”
“We should sell tickets to the wedding festival,” Sebastian suggested as the various restaurants and bakeries of Harrogate assembled their cakes for testing.
“We can’t sell tickets to a festival. It’s sacrilegious.”
“We could give out tickets to people who actually live here,” he conceded.
“Tickets would help cut down the sheer number of people, and the money could go to charity.”
“We certainly can’t sell tickets if people are expected to eat what Girl Meets Fig is serving,” Ida declared.
Edith Rogers drew herself up. “This is a very scrumptious vegan cake.”
Zoe, standing next to her grandmother, made a face. “It does have a lot of fiber. Like, alotof fiber.”
“It is the official Harrogate health cake,” Edith announced. “All organic, and the ingredients are locally sourced!”
“I saw you out there gathering tree bark and weeds on the side of the road,” Ida complained. “You can’t serve that to people. There isn’t even any frosting on it.”
Edith cut off a piece of cake and handed it to me.
I took a very small bite and winced. It was dry and crumbly. Somehow the fact that it was slightly sweet made it worse.
“That does seem very healthy,” I said, looking around desperately for some water.
“It’s good for pregnancies too,” Edith informed Meg as she took a bite and kept a poker face that must have been honed from years of public service.
“We will keep it in mind.”
We headed over to the next table.
“Absolutely not,” Hunter barked.
“But we made a whole cake!” his younger brothers insisted.
They whisked a white sheet off a three-tiered cake. Each layer resembled a giant puffy chocolate chip cookie.
“It’s cookie-dough bread cake,” one of them said brightly. “We worked hard on it. We’re going to open an online cake delivery shop.”
“That’s very entrepreneurial of you,” I told the kids.
“Our cakes are all keto and low carb, too, because it’s a growing market.”
They cut out a big slice and handed it to me. “Anything that looks like a giant cookie is good by me,” I said and took a big bite. I chewed…and chewed.
