SPLITAPARTS: lessons in love ✔️

The Best Christmas Present Ever- Part Two

Christmas dinner happily, was a grand affair. Cassie was grateful to her son for realizing her unspoken wishes to capture it on film. She brought out two homemade cheesecakes, thinking that Sirius might try to consume one by himself since it was a favorite special dessert.
He looked hard at the bare dessert still in the glass pie plate and raised his brow. Finally, he pointed to it. "Hey Dee, what's that?"

She realized quickly that he didn't remember and his daughter realized it as well. Andromeda covered her mouth with her fingers. "It's called cheesecake Sirius--would you like to try a piece of it?"

Sirius nodded. "Mmhmm."

"Toppings?"

"Yes please?"

Cassie sliced a small piece of the confection on to the black plate and topped it with the strawberries and glaze, then a dollop of whipped cream. "These are Mom's strawberries--probably the sweetest on the planet," she said as she placed the small dessert plate before him.

He sat still in his seat for a moment before he picked up his fork, aware that everyone was watching him with interest. He looked up and eyed everyone at the table. "Will you all kindly find something else to look at please," he said almost laughing, then looked to Ryan who had the video camera trained on him. "And YOU! Turn that damned thing off!"

"No. Way. Eat."

Sirius sneered into the camera and flicked two fingers in the air which caused Cassie to laugh quietly and he looked toward her. "What if I don't like it?"

She looked at the dessert and then into his eyes. You will

How do you know?

"Because Sirius--it's your recipe, well mostly at any rate."

"Yeah?"

She nodded. "Uh huh. The pie shell, the toppings the dessert itself is all yours."

"Took you a while to perfect it as well," Remus said. "It turned out to be a favorite of James--ate most of the throw-aways--started putting on the pounds and Lily put a stop to that when he had to get new clothes because he couldn't fit into his old stuff--"

Harry laughed. "My dad got fat from eating sweets!"

"He most certainly did," Alastor replied. "Lots of energy though--" he said as he sipped on his sherry.

Sirius' brow knotted. "Why am I seeing a wedding cake in my head?"

"Probably because you made a cheesecake for the top of their wedding cake--" Remus said.

Sirius nodded. "Took me three tries to get it right?"

Cassie nodded as she closed her eyes remembering. "You were soooo furious."

"I seem to recall an argument about it--"

Cassie nodded again and chuckled. "Mmhmm."

He looked to her and pointed to the cheesecake. "You wanted me to make two small ones and stack them and I said, no way--"

"Ohhh--you said a lot more than that!" Cassie looked across the table toward Harry and winked.

"It was for James and Lily--it had to be perfect," he whispered tohimself.

Harry's face was lit up like a Christmas tree and his smile was infectious. "So, what happened?"

Cassie chuckled. "Well--it was a comedy of errors--if it hadn't happened to us, it probably would have been funny as hell! When he finally got it done to his satisfaction, it had to be refrigerated and we still had to get it to the ballroom at the London Hilton which wasn't exactly close by and we had to take it by car--had to borrow a Ministry car. Anyway, we got it there and the baker of the rest of the wedding cake pulled it out of the box and almost dropped it because it was so heavy you see? The damned thing was six inches high--that's unheard of for this kind of dessert! Then we had to place it on the second tier of the wedding cake and make it so that it didn't sink--"