Meg took a bite and winced. “I like the chocolate chips.”
It did not taste like cookie dough, not one little bit. Not only that, but the cake was not that tasty. It was like eating a damp sponge.
“It only uses four ingredients—eggs, chocolate chips, cashew butter, and baking soda!”
“You really tried,” I told them.
Meg silently offered Hunter a bite.
He chewed, spit it into a napkin, then told the kids, “You cannot serve that to people.”
The kids started crying. “But we tried!”
The next cakes tasted slightly better. They were from legitimate baking shops. One confection was a red velvet cake shaped like a swan.
“You put a lot of work into it.”
“I made it for my boyfriend’s birthday,” the baker explained, pulling out a big cleaver. “Of course, it turned out that he was going to celebrate his birthday not with cake but inside of his coworker. So.” She chopped the head off the swan and put it on a plate for us. “It’s all yours.”
Sebastian looked perturbed after the cake tasting.
“It is not enough cake,” he told me, showing me the spreadsheet on his tablet.
“So we’ll buy some from Costco.”
“The Facebook event check-in is at five hundred thousand.”
“No way are all those people going to show up.”
Sebastian opened his mouth.
“And before you start talking about people buying tickets, did you see the offerings in there? We can’t charge people for that.”
“Five dollars,” Sebastian pleaded. “Even five dollars could put a dent in the insanity.”
“Fine,” I said, “but I don’t like it.”
* * *
But during thenext few days of wedding planning, I decided he might actually be right.
The wedding festival was reaching legendary proportions. The festival committee had raised the stall fee because of the amount of interest from vendors out of the area wanting to participate. On a normal festival day, we usually only lined stalls along Main Street. Now the two parallel streets on either side were filled with stalls, plus the cross streets connecting them.
The wedding was in less than two weeks, and epic was an understatement. The businesses had already started decorating, and workers had decorated the lampposts, the city hall, and the gazebo with ribbons and signs congratulating Meg and Hunter.
“We’re going to have so much press,” Ivy said giddily as we walked down Main Street to the next wedding planning meeting. “Everyone is covering it. Gunnar and Dana with Romance Creative are making a reality TV show about the wedding. It’s insane! We cannot screw this up.”
My stomach churned. I still didn’t have a good solution to the cake situation, and now we had to go pick out party favors.
“Everything has to be perfect,” Ivy reminded me.
But my friend was not from a small town. We small-town folk could achieve plucky and resourceful. We were what you might describe as having a lot of heart. Perfect? Flawless? I wasn’t sure Harrogate could pull it off, and I was even less sure that I could.
36
Sebastian
“Ihave concerns about this wedding,” I told Hunter as we walked toward the town square, where we were going to review the party favors for the wedding.
