Cake on a Hot Tin Roof Read online

  Well. That ought to help me relax. No pressure at all.

  I chewed on my bottom lip and argued with myself for a few seconds. Maybe I could leave work a few minutes early. Someone else on staff could stick around here to make sure all the orders were filled. My staff was competent and well trained. They didn’t need me to hold their hands to make sure the work was done. And if leaving early would help me land the Hedge-Montgomery wedding contract, everyone at Zydeco would benefit. Win-win.

  “Fine, I’ll be there by seven,” I said, making an executive decision. “Should I bring anything special with me?”

  “Just your sunny personality.” I could hear the triumphant smile in Miss Frankie’s voice. “But don’t keep the staff working too late. They’re all on the guest list, too, and you know Philippe wouldn’t want them to miss out.”

  She was right about that. Philippe had loved a good party more than almost anything else. If he’d still been alive, the whole bakery would have shut down early so the staff could get ready, even if he’d lost business as a result.

  I’d always been more practical. It’s not that I don’t like a good party. I’m fun. I just believe that work should come first, especially in our current circumstances.

  Zydeco’s reputation had suffered a hit because of Philippe’s death. We’d lost enough business to hurt our bottom line, and new orders had been slower to come in since I took over at the bakery’s helm. I guess people were waiting to see whether I could maintain the high quality and creative genius Zydeco was known for.

  Eventually people would realize that the quality of our work hadn’t suffered. But until then, we’d have to rely even more than usual on the income we could make during Mardi Gras. Shutting the whole operation down early and losing walk-in customers wasn’t an option I would consider.

  I was trying to figure out a tactful way of saying so when Dwight Sonntag looked up from his work table and gave me the stink eye. He jerked his chin toward my own station, where the work was beginning to pile up. “Hey! Rita! A little help?”

  I’ve known Dwight since pastry school in Chicago. He’s a talented cake artist with a strict work ethic, but you’d never know that to look at him. He’s six-foot-nothing with shaggy hair and an untidy beard, both tucked into sanitary netting when he’s working. His clothes hang off his thin frame and he slouches through life looking as if he just rolled out of bed. But there was nothing casual about the frustration glinting in his hazel eyes this morning.

  I held up a finger to indicate that I’d be finished in a minute and told Miss Frankie, “I have to go.”

  “Trouble?”

  “Nothing I can’t handle.”

  Since I took over at Zydeco I’ve tried to protect Miss Frankie from unpleasant reality whenever possible. Partly because losing her only son had left her vulnerable and—let’s face it—a little unhinged. But also because my life is a lot easier when Miss Frankie doesn’t know about every speed bump Zydeco encounters. If it’s earth-shattering, I discuss it with her, but if I ran to her every time one of my eccentric, talented, and emotional staff members got upset, I’d never get anything else done.

  A momentary silence fell between Miss Frankie and me, followed by a soft, resigned sigh. “Seven o’clock,” she said again. “Don’t be late.”

  Two

  Knowing that Miss Frankie would call at least once more before the afternoon was over, I disconnected and stuffed my cell phone into the pocket of my white chef’s jacket. As I turned toward the bank of sinks on the far wall, Ox, my second in command, appeared in the doorway leading to the bakery’s front offices. He scanned the room looking for someone, and I had a feeling that someone was me.

  Ox is a big man, a dead ringer for an African-American Mr. Clean. He’s deeply committed to Zydeco and willing to do whatever it takes to make the business succeed. He also has the right breeding to work with our clientele. Known to his mother’s highbrow friends as Wyndham Oxford III, he’s far more comfortable at society events than I’ll ever be. He bucked family tradition to attend pastry school, where Philippe and I met him, and he’s in many ways my closest friend. Not that that stops him from trying to prove that he’d be a better choice than me to run Zydeco.

  He spotted me and plunged into the chaos, making his way across the room with dogged determination. “Got a minute?” he asked when he reached me.

  I shrugged and turned on the water, then squirted soap into my hands. I could feel Dwight glaring at me, but I wasn’t in the mood to deal with both of them at the same time, so I avoided eye contact with him. “A minute? Sure,” I told Ox. “You have sixty seconds, starting now. What’s up?”

  He didn’t even twitch a lip at my little joke. “Edie tells me you haven’t approved the content of the web page I sent you on Wednesday. Is there a problem?”

  His question made my smile fade. I couldn’t believe he wanted to talk about the website now. Couldn’t he see how swamped we were?

  I rinsed the soap from my hands and used my elbow to turn off the faucet. “No problem,” I said, reaching for a paper towel, “unless you count the total lack of time. I’ll get to it by the end of the week, I promise.”

  I’d been saying those last two words far too often lately, and I knew they’d catch up with me soon. In the meantime, I just kept running from crisis to crisis, putting out the biggest fire first and hoping I could get to the smaller ones before the flames got too high.

  Wrinkles formed in Ox’s usually smooth forehead, and his dark eyes turned stormy. “That web page is supposed to go live today. Or didn’t you bother to look at the production schedule I e-mailed you last week?”

  “I looked at it,” I said.

  And I had.

  Okay. So I’d skimmed it the day he sent it to me and filed it away in a folder on my computer. The point is, I’d intended to go over it in detail. Later. When I had the time.

  Which probably wouldn’t be until Mardi Gras was over, Lent was in full swing, and I’d had time to recover from the nervous breakdown I could feel threatening to erupt.

  I shot a pointed look at the commotion all around us. “Maybe you haven’t noticed, but things are a little busy right now. I’ll get to it as soon as I can.”

  Ox folded his arms across his chest. “The web designer is waiting for it now.”

  He was making me feel defensive and I hate feeling defensive. Last fall, I agreed to hire a couple of guys to create our web presence. They were young, talented, and eager to make their mark. Most important, since they were just starting out, they were relatively inexpensive. I’d left the rest to Ox, hoping that giving him lead on the project would smooth some of the feathers Miss Frankie had ruffled when she’d passed him over and chosen me to take over at Zydeco. So far, all it had done was make him more restless.

  “We’re paying those guys to wait,” I pointed out. “It’s their job.”

  Ox rolled his eyes. “Very professional attitude.” He glanced at Dwight’s workstation with a scowl. “You wouldn’t be so busy if you’d just stuck with our original recipe, you know.”

  It was my turn to roll my eyes. Against Ox’s advice, I’d added two additional varieties of King Cake to our menu this year. He was a purist, convinced that the only good King Cake was one without filling. A large portion of the New Orleans population agreed with him, but there were hundreds of thousands of potential clients who thought a little cream cheese–cinnamon or strawberry filling made the cake better. I happened to agree with them. So far, the new varieties were selling well—a fact that made me happy but stuck in Ox’s craw.

  “What are you saying?” I asked him. “That the only good changes around here are the ones you suggest?”

  “Seems to me, you’re the one who feels that way.”

  Like anything else, there are good things and bad about hiring friends. Our friendship means that he can sometimes finish my sentences and guess what I want even before I figure it out. It also means that the lines sometimes blur and Ox occasionally for
gets which of us is in charge. We were getting nowhere fast with the finger-pointing, so I pulled us back to the original subject.

  “Just explain the situation to the web guys,” I said with a brittle smile. “They’re from New Orleans. They know all about Mardi Gras. I’m sure they’ll understand what we’re up against.”

  Ox’s eyebrows beetled over his deep-set eyes. “Approving the content for that page will take you fifteen minutes. Thirty, tops. It doesn’t make sense to put it off when you could just do it now.”

  I dried my hands and returned to my workstation. “I already agreed to the initial launch of the bare-bones site on your timetable,” I reminded him. “I need you to be content with that. Upgrading can come later. Right now, we have more important things to think about.”

  He gave me a look, which I ignored. “Such as?”

  “I just found out that Ivanka Hedge and Richard Montgomery will be at the party tonight. I could use some help figuring out the best way to approach them and I’m behind here, as you can see. So instead of arguing with me, why don’t you pull up a table and help? The sooner we fill all these orders, the sooner I can get to that page you’re so worried about.”

  The sour look on Ox’s face sweetened slightly. He wanted the Hedge-Montgomery wedding business as much as I did. “I have a wedding consult in fifteen minutes,” he reminded me. “And I have to deliver the birthday party cake before six. Otherwise, I’d be glad to.”

  Which kind of proved my point. We were both too busy to be playing around with upgrades to the website. I breathed a silent sigh of relief, thinking that we’d put the website issue on the back burner for now. Allowing two hours with the future bride and groom, I guessed he’d finish the consult just in time to deliver the sculpted football helmet cake to a sports bar across town for a die-hard Saints fan’s fiftieth birthday bash. That would put him back at Zydeco just in time to drive to the country club with a van full of King Cakes. That schedule left almost no time to bring up the website issue again until tomorrow.

  But Ox wasn’t finished yet. “Have you given the other matter any thought?”

  My relief died a quick death, and that put a scowl on my face. Rather than snapping at Ox, I channeled my frustrations into rolling out one of the many balls of dough waiting for my attention into a long rope. “If you’re asking about the blog, the answer’s still no.”

  “Why am I not surprised? Just tell me one thing: Did you do what I suggested?”

  I shook my head. “I haven’t had time to read other blogs. Ask me again when Mardi Gras is over. We can revisit the idea then.”

  “Then will be too late,” Ox said, leveling me with a look. “Have you read any of the e-mails I’ve sent you?”

  “Of course.” It was just a tiny white lie.

  He perched on the edge of an unused table. “This is the hot season, Rita. We can only sell King Cakes for a few weeks every year, but we make seventy-five percent of our annual income during those weeks. With business down overall and the economy tanking, we need every advantage we can find.”

  I couldn’t argue with that. “I understand,” I began.

  Ox went on before I could finish. “A bakery without an online storefront is practically obsolete in today’s market. We should have launched the website when Zydeco opened.”

  I couldn’t argue with that either. My almost-ex had been notoriously outdated. “That’s why I agreed to launch the site to begin with,” I pointed out. “I just didn’t realize it was going to be so time-consuming. Can’t we just push it off another six months? Get the site up and running when we’re not so busy so that we’re ready for next year?”

  Ox shook his head. “That’s not a good idea. Nobody looks for businesses in the phone directory anymore. Newspaper advertising is almost obsolete, and we’re getting lost on the radio with all the other ads shouting over the top of us. If consumers want to find something these days, they go to the Internet. We need the site up and running now. This year. We can’t afford to wait.”

  “But we have a page,” I said. “It’s working. Orders are coming in. Why can’t we wait for the rest?”

  His exasperation with me came out on a heavy sigh. “It’s not enough to just put a static page on the Internet and hope for the best. We need updated content daily and a presence on the social networks driving traffic to the site. One of us should be tweeting and posting on Facebook every day.”

  He was passionate about the website, but lack of passion had never been an issue with Ox. Hoping he wasn’t going to suggest that I be the one to start tweeting, I glanced toward the boxes stacked near the loading dock. “You really think we need more orders? Between our regular business and the King Cakes for Mardi Gras, we’re barely keeping up as it is.”

  “Yes, I do.” He sighed and rubbed his face with one hand. When he spoke again, his tone was a little less severe. “We’re in danger of appearing way behind the times, especially since Gateaux just launched their new site. If we aren’t competitive, we’ll lose more market share than we already have.”

  He certainly knew which buttons to push. Dmitri Wolff, owner of Gateaux, a rival pastry shop, had been actively trying to put Zydeco out of business since we opened. He’d made a serious effort to buy out Miss Frankie, and he was still our biggest competitor.

  I didn’t want to make business decisions based on fear, but I could feel my resolve weakening. “Why can’t we just make it up after Mardi Gras?” I said with a frown. “The quality of our specialty cakes should speak for itself.”

  Ox stood again and the corners of his mouth curved into a regretful smile. “I wish it did, but if we lose as much business as I think we will, it could take three or four years to recoup. We’re not in a position to take a hit like that.”

  Logically I knew the drop in business after Philippe’s murder wasn’t my fault, but that didn’t stop me from feeling responsible. My shoulders sagged and I gave in to the inevitable. “Fine,” I said with a sigh. “I’ll check out the content for the web page before I leave for the day. Will that make you happy?”

  “Ecstatic,” he said with a grin. “And the blog? You’ll write one?”

  I’d rather make a thousand buttercream roses using a sandwich bag, but the work was seriously starting to back up and I was the sticking point. “Fine. Okay? Just not now.”

  Triumph flashed in Ox’s eyes. “Good.”

  Yeah. Whatever. He wasn’t the one who had to come up with pithy, perky topics to write about several times a week. I made a face at him and shooed him away. “You only say that because you won. Now go. Get back to work. Do something creative and wonderful so I don’t regret this moment of weakness.”

  He grinned. “Your wish is my command,” he said as he turned to leave.

  If only that were actually true.

  Three

  I concentrated on rolling and braiding the rounds of dough that kept piling up in front of me. Within minutes, I was caught up in the rhythm of the work and some of my tension began to fade.

  Working in the kitchen always helps me relax, and soon I’d destressed enough to enjoy the feel of dough under my fingers and the aromas of yeast and cinnamon that filled the air. After an hour or two, I was even feeling cautiously optimistic about my chances of being able to leave by six.

  King Cakes aren’t actually difficult to make and they’re not especially time-consuming either—unless you’re making several hundred at a time. Abe Cobb, Zydeco’s baker, works during the wee hours of the morning while the rest of us sleep. He’s not really a people person, so he likes it that way. Last night, while the cakes for our regular business orders baked and cooled, he had prepared enough dough to keep the rest of us busy all day. He’d spent hours scalding the milk, activating the yeast, mixing in cinnamon, nutmeg, vanilla, and lemon zest and then kneading and leaving the dough to rise in every available space until the rest of us arrived at daybreak.

  Dwight, with his cap and beard mask, takes the next step in the process. When he’s
not sculpting a cake or working with fondant, he punches down the risen dough and kneads each ball until the dough is smooth and elastic. Then he sets it aside to rise a second time until it’s doubled in size, a process that takes about ninety minutes.

  And that’s where I come in.

  Between problem-solving and handling my other obligations, I divide each batch into three balls of equal size, then roll each one into a thin rope. I braid them together, forming each braid into a circle and pinching the ends to create a seal. Once I have a ring of braided dough, I insert the small plastic baby figurine, then place the cakes on baking sheets and slide them to the end of the table, where they rise for a third time, until the cakes are doubled in size. This time the wait is about thirty minutes. Once the cakes have risen, Estelle Jergens breaks away from her gum-paste work to transport each tray to the kitchen for baking. When they come out of the oven, she relays the baked cakes to the cooling racks.

  Estelle is short and round, with a riot of red curls that escape every effort she makes to restrain them. At forty-something, she’s also the oldest member of the staff. Carting all those cakes around has her moving in and out of the kitchen so quickly, I expect her to lose those forty pounds she’s always complaining about by the time Mardi Gras is over.

  Her third job is to carry the cooled cakes to Sparkle Starr’s corner of the design center—a spot that somehow escapes the sun no matter what time of year it is. The location of Sparkle’s workstation is no accident. I’m half convinced she’d turn to dust if the sunlight ever made direct contact. She’s the daughter of aging hippie parents who raised their children in a commune long after the lifestyle went out of fashion. I’m still trying to figure out whether Sparkle’s dour personality and her love of all things goth is natural or if she’s in rebellion against a childhood of flower power and free love. Either way, the name doesn’t fit the woman.