“You’re not doing this alone,” Jack said seriously.
Autumn teared up at the support from her friends. “I’ll be sure to ask for help this time around,” she promised. “This is a well-oiled machine, and we had a system set up for when they were gone the first time, but this time…”
I’d planned on calling Hazel after this competition because of how down I felt this morning, but I decided to put my feelings on the back burner. She had enough on her plate already.
We returned to our places and found our cakes had cooled. I jumped back into action, prepared to decorate better than I’d ever decorated before. Though that experience was very limited. One year, for a friend’s birthday, I made a mirror glaze that went over some buttercream icing. Complete with my edible glitter, the idea formed itself. Galaxy glaze. I tried not to bolster my ego too much, but the wordsgeniusandbrilliantboth came to mind.
Then I noticed that my cake had cracked a little. Had I baked it for too long? I touched the worst side, and a piece fell. Dammit. I grabbed some buttercream and added it before placing it back together. It would be fine. What I needed to worry about was my glaze. Despite my careful reading of the recipe, the consistency wasn’t quite right.
I glanced at my competition and found mixed reactions to everyone’s creations, but the confident, smiling faces concerned me the most. I should have been happy for them, but I found myself more jealous than anything. My ambition was starting to get the best of me. I took a breath and told myself to take it down a notch.
It was out of my control. I could lose this one, but as long as Jack didn’t win, I’d be okay with the result.
It was now or never. I poured the glaze over the frosted cake, but it spread too quickly and almost melted the frosting below. Oh god, I must have put it on when it was too hot. I tried scooping it off the wax paper so I could respread, but the entire thing was dripping, and it was too thin to pick up.
I looked at the clock. I had fewer than ten minutes to make this into a masterpiece. I took a breath and assessed. So the glaze didn’t work. That was okay. But it had melted the frosting below, and that was also sliding off the cake. I took a spreading knife to try to blend it, but the gelatin mixture plus the frosting was turning into this chunky monstrosity.
We had less than a minute to go. I continued to fix the frosting, which was still melting off. Then, with ten seconds left, I threw some glitter onto the thing, and voilà.
It looked horrendous.
I didn’t want to present to the judges. Maybe I could just throw the cake at Jack and run out of the mess hall. Could there really be consequences for that? People would probably get a kick out of it. I would.
A pathetic whimper came from behind me, and I did a one-eighty. Jack’s cake was looking sad and kind of collapsing on itself.
“I don’t want to hear it,” he warned the second he saw my face. I was trying to hold back from laughing and the tears caused by the full-body shaking I was doing.
“Is yours supposed to look like a collapsing soufflé?” I barely got it out. And despite trying my very best, I burst into laughter.
He did not look pleased.
Then he leaned around me to see my creation, which was looking more and more like the Frankenstein of cakes, now that the broken piece was separating from the mainland.
“It’s a galaxy cake,” I tried.
“Galaxy? That thing needs to be taken out by a meteor.”
“Hey!”
We were gaining the attention of other counselors, some of whom had placating faces, while the rest were chuckling.
“Ooh, Nat, are you gonna put that on your socials?” my ex-friend Sawyer snarked.
“No, don’t do it,” Emerson said seriously. “That will lose you followers.”
Jack cackled.
Bobby clapped. “Okay, everyone, please leave your creations on your workstations and stand in a line. We’ll call each of you up. Starting with Sawyer.”
Sawyer’s Coke cake was lauded because of their decorative ingenuity. They’d made a swirly design with the marshmallows and even made little chocolate trees that wrapped around the side. How had they found the time for that? The judges loved Lamar’s cake for its layered lemon design placed over his drizzled almond icing.
Chase’s matcha cherry cake was the perfect bright green and had edible violets on top that made it look like a garden.
By the time it was Emerson’s turn, I wondered what my trainwreck of a cake looked like.
“Tell us about your cake, Emerson.” Bobby’s eyes lit up even though Emerson’s cake looked a little wonkier than the others.
“It’s a lavender, vanilla bean, vodka cake.”
