Which would be difficult if Matt wouldn’t even participate.
He hadn’t even touched so much as an eggbeater.
I just have to convince him to make a truffle. Then that should count.
I laid parchment paper out over the cold metal slab I had stored in the freezer. Though the winter air in the outdoor stage was wreaking havoc on my cheesecake batter, the chill would be very helpful while I tried to make my chocolate.
I had taken a candy-making class once, and I liked watching chocolate-making videos on TikTok. I also regularly made chocolate bark for Christmas gifts, so it wasn’t as if I had no idea what I was doing. I could handle these truffles, right?
I glanced over at a neighboring baking station. The two girls who were clearly trained pastry chefs were making intricate chocolate art sculptures.
We just can’t be last place. Cs get degrees. If you get a good score from the judges, you’re going to go home, practice, and do better next time. Well, try to practice.
It wasn’t as if I had a kitchen. I had been living in my shop. Against the terms of the lease? Sure. But because Harrogate and its Christmas market were on all the top ten Christmas lovers’ lists, it was impossible to find a place to rent this time of year, and in no way would I have been able to afford a place even if I had found one.
You can do a lot with a microwave and a toaster oven, I reminded myself as I poured the cranberry mixture out over the slab. The mixture immediately started to cool. I cut the bright red sticky glaze into pieces then rolled them into balls.
So far so good. I set the ruby-red balls aside in a glass bowl over another bowl of ice water then poured out the chocolateganacheonto a fresh sheet of parchment paper. With my metal spatula, I scraped and worked theganache, trying to make sure it had no lumps.
“Sure would be nice to have a big strong bake-off partner do this manual labor,” I said pointedly.
Matt glanced up from his phone. “I’m good.”
Shit. I needed him to participate.
“We could lose if you don’t help.”
“Oh, so sad,” he said in a flat tone and looked back at his phone.
“They’re going to get grainy!” someone from the crowd of onlookers yelled at me.
I ignored them. The townspeople had been drinking and calling out tips to the bakers all morning.
“Calm down!” one of the production assistants yelled at the crowd.
“She’s ruining those truffles,” a man insisted. I looked down.
“Those are looking a little curdled,” Matt said, peering over my shoulder.
I blew out a breath.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said, parceling the chocolate out into even-sized chocolate patties.
“I have a plan,” I yelled back out to the man in the crowd.
“Doesn’t look like it,” Matt said as I plopped my little gooey balls of sticky cranberry on each chocolate truffle, rolled them into semi-round spheres, then left them to sit and set in the cold air.
“Aren’t you concerned?” he asked. At a nearby station, a man and a woman, who were working very efficiently, had a whole set of perfect little mini cheesecakes that jiggled delightfully.
I looked down at my truffles and swallowed. “They just have to taste good.”
“I’m pretty sure the judges aren’t going to want to be served something that looks like it was sitting in your car trunk for a week.”
“Oh?” I said sweetly. “Are you starting to get worried?”
“No,” Matt scoffed. “You’re the one who wants to win; you should be worried.”
“Oh no,” I told him as I went to the stove to check the temperature of the melted chocolate that I was going to coat the truffles in. “I’m not the one who’s going to be humiliated when we lose. I’m the poor hapless little baker. You’re the big bad billionaire who’s going to get his ass kicked on live TV by his ex-fiancée and the guy she was cheating on you with.”
