Sugar and Spice

Chapter 9: Sugar Plums and Caramel

Five hours after beginning work, Jennie stood back and heaved a sigh of satisfied, contented relief. After all her worrying, after all the stressing, after not being able to sleep and staying up for the half the night thinking about all the things that could possibly go wrong...It was finished. It was finished on time. And, most importantly of all, it looked - even if she did say so herself - absolutely stunning.

Croquembouche.

A glistening tower of choux pastry buns, formed into a perfect cone and filled with the lightest, smoothest crème pâtissière that had been delicately flavoured with orange. Thin strands of spun sugar, hardened into caramel, were draped over the cone like fine netting, effectively holding it together, while small pralines - whole almonds coated in caramelized sugar - nestled in amongst the pastry rounds alongside tiny pink butterflies made out of icing. For the final flourish, little spoonful of dried fruit had been coated in the same caramelized sugar to form sugar plums, before being artfully arranged around the bottom and on the top of the pyramid.

As an alternative to a traditional wedding cake, Jennie thought, it couldn't get much better.

Jennie knew it was silly, but she always felt ridiculously proud of herself whenever she made a croquembouche, despite the fact that she had, by now, lost count of the precise number that she had done. Technically, a croquembouche was tricky, and it also required artistic skill - especially for some of the more flamboyant styles that she had been asked to make in the past. Once made, it had a shelf-life of approximately twenty-four hours before it started to slowly sink in on itself, which meant that it needed to be done on the day - a time constraint which only added to the other pressures. And she always felt a little twinge of self-satisfaction at the fact that she was good enough to pull it off.

But what really got her pride going, every single time, was managing to achieve the desired result without giving herself stab wounds or third degree sugar burns. Molten caramel was bad enough, but when it hardened into shards it was lethal.

And now, having completed the pyramid without mishap - and without it collapsing, which was always another major worry - she had precisely one hour to get it to Jeongyeon and Nayeon's reception venue before she could finally relax. Grabbing her camera, she took a few quick photos before calling Irene to help her maneuver the pyramid into the specially-made box, and then through to the small pâtisserie van that she had bought and kept solely for occasions such as these. Fortunately, she didn't have far to go. And although the couple had chosen to have a Friday wedding, the timings meant that Jennie would not have to battle through the rush hour in order to get there - a prospect that always filled her with dread. She hated driving through Paris traffic at the best of times, and knowing that she had such a fragile cargo only made her fret even more. This time, though, she had something to take her mind off it.

Instead of thinking about all the disasters that could befall her in between the pâtisserie and the reception venue, she thought about Lisa.