"Sounds ambitious. I can't wait!"
Anastasia went to talk to Nina while I assembled ingredients.
For the bright spot of Christmas, I was going to make little pagodas. After melting colored sugar, I made little puzzle pieces and melted the edges then stuck them together to form the structure. When those were done, I candied flower petals and carefully stuck them onto the pagodas. It was a little burst of color, and the sugar made the flower petals look as if they were covered in a layer of frost.
For the various sauces I was going to use to draw patterns on the plates, I made reductions of cranberries, pears, spiced oranges, plums, holly, pine, and spiced wine.
The dessert couldn't just be melted sugar, however. There had to be some dimensionality to it. I made a series of desserts, cookies, two kinds of cakes, two kinds of tarts, and also some candied nuts. These I would cut up or crumble up and place the pieces around the garden.
After I had everything baked and set, I was ready to plate my dessert. First on the plate, I spooned swirls of the sauces I had made. The cameras zoomed in on me as I carefully constructed the dessert. For the garden's "plants," I had made flavored mousse and custards that I spooned carefully in between the swirls. For visual interest, I placed pieces of the cakes, shortbreads, and candies I had made around the plate. Finally, I used a small machine from Platinum Provisions to create a layer of pine-scented fog on the plate around the treats.
The judges applauded when we were finished, and Nina and I hugged.
Jack had come in some time during the challenge. I hadn't been paying attention. He saw me looking, and he quickly averted his eyes. I felt sick. Winning the competition wouldn’t mean anything if I lost Jack.
58
Jack
Ihad missed Chloe last night. The penthouse felt empty without her. The boxes of Christmas decorations she had gone to collect from my parents sat on my dining room table, mocking me.
Though I knew Dana wanted me to be there in the morning for the last competition ofTheGreat Christmas Bake-Off, I didn't know if I could face Chloe. I felt terrible for how I had acted. I cringed, remembering how she had cried in my car then run away after I tried to explain.
Ignoring Dana's phone calls and deleting her furious voicemail messages, I went to the Platinum Provisions office instead of the studio. The marketing team was grinning broadly when they walked into the conference room.
"Check out these numbers!" the marketing director said. "We practically sold out of the first round of product we shipped to the stores. The factories are working overtime to make more. There are millions of dollars' worth of preorders for the next deliveries."
"Thank you for your hard work," I told them. "You will of course be receiving massive Christmas bonuses." There were big smiles and applause.
"Great way to end the year," Liam said as we walked out of the building.
"For Platinum Provisions," I told him grumpily. "I still haven't figured out a way to save my tower."
"I thought Mark Holbrook was going to move in?" Liam asked.
I scowled. "Mark Holbrook specifically asked for a full-service restaurant that was run by Chloe. She sent him a box of special muffins that his whole family loved. But Greg doesn't want Chloe to open a restaurant in the retail space. He wants to put the New York Bread Company there instead."
"He wants a chain!" Liam exclaimed. "That’s horrible."
"It's not like I even asked Chloe if she would be open to the idea of running a restaurant," I admitted. "She always said she wanted to have a little bakery or café, not a restaurant."
"Did you ask her if she wanted to run a restaurant in Frost Tower, specifically, though?" Liam asked.
"No," I confessed, "I didn't. And I think she's mad at me." I told Liam what had happened with my parents.
Liam whistled. "That's insane. Your parents are crazy, dude."
"I need to make it up to her somehow," I said.
"She'll win the competition, then she'll be super happy," Liam said confidently. "You can rub her feet, offer her a killer restaurant space, and she'll like you again."
"I hope so."
I walked into the studio right as Chloe and Nina were finishing plating their dishes.
Chloe had made a delicate dessert called Winter Garden with a little pagoda made out of melted sugar.
"It's beautiful," I told her. It was like a perfect miniature garden. It wasn't a replica, though. It was just abstract enough not to look kitschy but to still evoke the feeling of a winter garden. There were tendrils of sauces, studded with little bits of chocolate, cake, mousse, and other desserts. There was a little layer of fog that smelled like pine that clung to the plate, swirling in tendrils as you moved your fork around.
