"And I'm serious about you having it," I told her. "Plan whatever you want."
"Great!" she said then gave me a slightly guilty look. "I just so happen to have some little email invitations ready to go." She opened her laptop. "I have it scheduled for Christmas Eve."
"Go ahead," I said, typing in my brothers’ email addresses.
"What about your sister?" She asked. I frowned.
"Not Belle. I'll ask her myself."
Chloe sent the email, then looked at me with concern on her face.
"Are you sure you're okay with this?" she asked.
"I want you to be happy, and if this is what you want—" I told her, taking her hands in mine.
"If it's not what you want…" she mumbled.
"I'll be fine. I'm happy if you're happy," I said firmly. And I wanted her to be happy enough to agree to run the restaurant.
53
Chloe
"There's nothing that says Christmas more than a gingerbread house," Anastasia said the next day. It was just Nina, Hartleigh, and me in the studio. One of us was going home. It had better be Hartleigh.
I knew Jack liked gingerbread, so I wasn't worried about him hating my dessert. Instead of a gingerbread house, though, I was making a whole village. I wasn't making a traditional Swiss Alps–type village though. I wanted to go all out for Christmas, so my gingerbread town was going to look like Whoville fromThe Grinch. To create that feel, I was going to make little curved roofs and whimsical shapes. Baking the gingerbread itself was easy. I whipped up a quadruple recipe in the giant mixer I had at my station. The air was pungent with cinnamon, cardamom, and nutmeg.
Jack came into the studio for a minute to watch me.
"You're distracting me," I told him. He gave me a look that could melt sugar.
"Jack, don't you want to see what I'm doing?" Hartleigh called.
"Have to run," he said to me. "Good luck."
While the gingerbread was still warm, I cut out the shapes for the buildings. I didn’t make the buildings too large; I didn't have time to do an adequate decorating job. I kept them small so the level of detail would be appropriate.
Platinum Provisions made a little press that let you create curved shapes in warm cookie dough, and gingerbread worked very well for it. My gingerbread recipe was different from my gingerbread cookie recipe. The dough I was using for the village was similar to what I used for Pfeffernüsse. It was malleable when it came out of the oven, but once it cooled, it was rigid. It was like biscotti almost. My oma would make them so people could let them swim in their tea or coffee when they came to visit.
I had to work fast with the 3D press to make the roof curves right. Then I lost myself in decorating my gingerbread village. Each little building in my gingerbread village needed to be unique. I used a modified royal icing to glue the gingerbread building pieces together. Once I was satisfied, I began to decorate. The icing piper made it easy to quickly and neatly draw on the little icicles, colorful lights, and whimsical decorations.
I also made various colored fondants to create winding paths, stairs, and a giant Christmas tree (relatively speaking) in the center of town. As I carefully arranged my houses, Anastasia came over, and the cameras that followed my every move panned to her.
"This is a beautiful little village," she cooed.
"My gingerbread village has to be lovely, but it still needs to taste good," I said. "So something unique I'm doing is adding little dipping sauces. Dipping gingerbread in various sauces gives it a different flavor profile and is something fun to do. Some of the chimneys and wells I'm filling with little custards or chocolate sauce or cream cheese dip. There should be something bitter, fruity, or a little sour to cut the sweetness of the gingerbread and the frosting."
"That is unique," said Anastasia, watching as I lined the chimneys and little wells with folded parchment paper. I didn't want the dipping sauces to melt the gingerbread.
I made the sauces, and while they were cooling, I put on the snow. It would look strange to dump powdered sugar over everything, so I used the snow-maker attachment on the air injector pump that Jack had made to my specifications. It made me feel special to use it, and the texture was amazing. It was almost like cotton candy but not. Once I had finished, it really did seem like the whole village had been snowed on. It was magical.
As I surveyed my work, looking for any missed spots, I was so into it that I didn't realize until right as she was behind me that Hartleigh was carrying something dangerously close to my workstation.
"Whoops!" she shrieked. I instinctively flung myself over the village. A cascade of soupy frosting coated my back. I could feel it in my hair, dripping down my neck, and in my eyes. Some of it was dripping on my gingerbread village, but fortunately it seemed mostly okay. It wasn’t anything I couldn't fix.
"You did that on purpose!" I hollered at Hartleigh and slapped her. I didn't hit her that hard, but my hand left a pink icing mark on her face.
"You bitch!" she screamed. "It was an accident! Your gingerbread isn't even ruined and youhit me!"
