Sugar and Spice

Chapter 1: Chocolate and Strawberries

Jennie Ruby Jane Kim was many things.

She was a daughter - adopted, so technically a daughter twice over.

She was a lover - although, unfortunately, that one was redundant for the moment, and had been for some time. But that didn't mean the potential wasn't there.

She was a friend - or, at least, she would be if she had more time for socializing, and didn't feel so horribly awkward in social situations. As it was, her main confidant and companion was Kuma the brown Pomeranian.

But, first and foremost, Jennie was a pâtissière. It was her passion, her dream, and had been ever since her childhood in Paris. That city was the home of many a sweet-toothed genius, and Jennie had found that, when her family moved to America in her early teens, even the bakeries of New York weren't quite the same. Now, back in the City of Light, pâtisserie was her business.

Being a pâtissière meant that Jennie considered herself something of a scientist. In essence, pastry-making was a series of chemical reactions between the ingredients that, when handled a certain way, produced the desired result. Everything had to be exact, otherwise that final result could be completely different from what was intended and would usually be a disaster. Measurements had to be precise, timings observed to the second and temperatures accurate, and any variation had to be perfectly calculated.

Jennie liked that. She liked to be able to predict things, and hated surprises. She also loved knowing why things happened the way that they did, and the chemistry behind the creation was something that she would spend hours researching and discovering. This penchant for orderliness and reasoning was not new, and had led some of her more unkind classmates at school in New England to call her 'Jennie the bore-a'. Now, at the age of twenty-six, she could look back and think that she probably had been.

Those traits, though, also came in very useful when it came to the business side of things, since running her own pâtisserie in a quiet corner of Paris had, to start with, tested even her high level of patience, intelligence and ability to deal with red tape. It had been a nightmare, and several times she had wondered what on earth she thought she was trying to do. But after years of hard work, two bank loans, and hundreds of bottles of pinot noir drunk in stress, anger, and just plain misery, she was successful. More than successful. She had a steady stream of regular customers that would have been enough to keep her going even without the special orders that flooded in for birthdays, weddings, christenings, funerals, bar mitzvahs, summer parties, Christmas parties.

Eventually she had had to expand, and now employed two part-time assistants to help run things. It was with some pride that she now felt able to call herself a proper businesswoman.