The Matchbaker (A Romantic Comedy) (9 page)

Eight

Well, here goes nothing.

I’m standing in the kitchen of Candy’s Confections, waiting for Mom to finish up whatever she’s doing on the floor so she can start teaching me how to bake. I’ve been outfitted in the requisite cupcake apron, and I have to admit, I look pretty cute. It’s pale blue with pink scalloping along all the edges, and though the topsy-turvy pastel cupcake pattern is hokey, the shape of the apron accentuates my waist nicely. I’m dressed a little more sensibly today than I was fifteen years ago for my first (and last) day on the job, but I still look good. Hair is swept into a ponytail, I’m wearing a short-sleeved white t-shirt from Calvin Klein, a pair of black leggings from Bebe, and my black and white Prada tennis shoes.

I look around the kitchen and realize that without Mom, I don’t know my way around this place at all. It’s neat and orderly; everything is organized by task. Mixers are all lined up next to a giant silver table where all the muffin pans are stacked. Directly opposite is the frosting station with more mixers situated next to food coloring and cooling racks. The biggest table—an island in the middle of the room—must be for decorating.

I’m fighting the panic that’s rising in my chest. How in the world am I supposed to learn about all this stuff before they leave? I would rather take Advanced Accounting again, and that was just about the biggest nightmare of my life.

“All righty, dearest,” Mom says as she bounds through the swinging door to the kitchen. She’s wearing the apron, too, only hers is over an old pair of pleated khaki pants and a dark green t-shirt that has oil stains and flour all over it. Holly and I will definitely have to take her shopping before the cruise. We can’t have her in pleats, for heaven’s sake! “Are you ready to get started?”

“Ready as I’ll ever be,” I say. I can’t keep the apprehension from my voice, but Mom offers a reassuring smile

“I just took a special order, so we’ll start with that.” She pulls a pink order form out of her apron pocket and sets it on the counter so we can both see. “This is for Stephanie Beach. She wants to give a half dozen Pucker Up cupcakes to her boyfriend.”

I stare at the ticket, wondering how Mom knows which flavor Stephanie wants. “Mom, all it says is ‘dating three weeks and no kiss yet.’”

“That’s right.” Mom crosses the room to the batter-making station and waves me over to join her. “So, we start by creaming the butter and the sugar together.” She measures both ingredients out and drops them into the mixer. While they’re “creaming,” she retrieves a carton of eggs from the other end of the counter. “We’re going to add each egg one by one.”

With rapid-fire movements, she gently but firmly cracks each egg on the side of the metal bowl and it plops into the mixture. Should I be writing this down? Already it seems like a lot of steps and measurements, and we’ve just started. Crap.

I look around for something to write on…and with.

“Honey, are you listening?”

I snap back to attention. “Oh, yeah. Of course.” It’s fine. I don’t need to write it down. We’ll be making plenty of batters over the next couple weeks, I’m sure I’ll get it down.

“Good.” She pulls a giant bag of flour out from under the counter and dips a measuring cup into it. “One cup of flour. Then only half the milk…all the sour cream…another cup of flour…the rest of the milk…and finally, lemon extract, lemon zest and butter flavor.”

Oh, God. My head is spinning. I should be writing this down.

“Got that?” she asks, and I stare at her dumbly. “Candy, I know it’s a lot to learn, but I promise you’ll be fine. Just relax and you’ll see—soon it will be second nature.”

I’m not convinced. Baking and second nature don’t really belong in the same sentence when it comes to me. But I have to trust her. She’s the only guidance I have. “All right,” I say, blowing out a long breath. “I’ll try.”

“Good.” Next she pulls down a large muffin pan and a box of our special-made cupcake liners. I see the old logo that said Dottie’s Delights has already been changed. Wow. They were really counting on me to do this. I mean, the sign out front was one thing, but there must be thousands of cupcake liners stacked here.

We fill the pan with the liners and then I reach for the bowl of batter.

“Uh-uh,” Mom says, grabbing the bowl from me. “Not yet.”

“Not yet?” I’m confused. I mean, I know I’m new to this whole baking thing, but I’m pretty sure the next step is to fill the liner thingies.

Mom doesn’t say anything. She pulls her old wooden spoon from the pocket of her apron. She’s had that thing forever, and always kept it in her pocket, but I never realized she actually used it. I thought she was just afraid of losing it.

“What, the mixer isn’t good enough for you?” I ask in that belligerent teenage girl way.

She ignores my attempt at humor and instead hands me the spoon. I look at its swirly etchings and then back at my mom. “Uh, what am I supposed to do with this?”

Mom takes a deep breath. “Close your eyes.”

I stare some more, assessing my mom’s mental state. She seems too young for dementia, but perhaps she’s one of those rare cases. Does Dad know?

“Candy, close your eyes!” Her tone is scarily close to “No more wire hangers!” so I do as I’m told. “Now, I want you to imagine the best kiss you’ve ever experienced in your life.”

It’s true. Mom is officially losing it.

“Candy!”

I open my eyes. “What?”

“You’re not doing it.”

How does she know that? “Fine, I’m sorry.” I close my eyes again and try to conjure the best kiss I’ve ever had when the sad realization dawns on me: I’ve never had a truly great kiss in my life. 

Well, that sucks. And I don’t want to share this with my mother. However, I don’t really see a way around it.

I open my eyes and look at her.

“What?” she asks.

I screw my face into a grimace. “Um, I’ve never had a…
good
kiss,” I admit.

Mom stares at me as if she’s a bit shell shocked. I can’t blame her. Her almost-twenty-nine-year-old daughter hasn’t ever been kissed properly. She must be wondering what the hell is wrong with me.

“Well, then you have to make something up,” she says, clearly avoiding the deeper issue and moving on to business.

“Make something up?”

“Is English not your first language? Yes. Make something up.
Pretend
. Close your eyes and imagine the perfect kiss with the perfect guy.”

Okay. That’s easy enough. I close my eyes and an image of Colin comes to mind. I know he’s dating my sister and I shouldn’t lust after him, but he’s my destiny, isn’t he?

“Focus, Candy,” Mom says, her voice low and trance-like.

As much as I want to fight the image of my sister’s boyfriend, I’m aware that I’m running out of time, with my mom standing there staring at me. But it’s fine, right? Holly doesn’t have to know. No one has to know that I have a tiny, itsy-bitsy crush on Colin. So I decide to go with it.

It’s a beautiful spring evening and we’ve just arrived at the Lover’s Bridge in Paris, a lock in hand so we can ensure our love forever. As we turn the key in our lock, it begins to drizzle, but we don’t care. We both love the rain, how it feels cool on our skin. How it turns the sky dark, and the lights on the bridge emit their romantic glow. Together, we toss the key into the Seine and then we turn to one another.

“I love you,” he whispers, and then he lowers his head to mine, capturing my lips in the most tender, most romantic kiss I’ve ever known.

“Now stir.”

I hear Mom’s voice, but it sounds different. Almost like my own, only it’s not, because it’s coming from far away. Mom must have moved across the room. I stir, holding the memory of the kiss as I do.

“All right, that’s enough!” Mom’s voice breaks into my reverie, and I let the spoon clank dully against the mixing bowl.

“
Now
we put the liners into the pan and fill them halfway.
Halfway,
Candy. No more.”

Geez. I understand what halfway means, but I try to curb my inclination toward copping an attitude. “Yup, got it.” I very carefully fill the liners to the halfway point using an ice cream scooper. It takes me forever, but I’m proud of myself when I’m done.

“Beautiful, sweetheart!” Mom says as she assesses my work. “Now we just pop them into a 350 degree oven for sixteen minutes.”

“Wow! That was easy.” I plop down on the stool and stare at my nails. I could definitely use a manicure. Maybe that little place up the street does okay work—

“Time for frosting!”

“Frosting?” I look up and Mom is already on the other side of the kitchen, pulling things out of the fridge and cabinets.

“You have eaten cupcakes before, Candy. I would expect you to know there’s frosting on top of them.”

“Oh, right…I just…” I realize what I’m about to say might be the dumbest thing that’s ever come out of my mouth, but it’s true. “I thought we used the canned stuff.”

Several utensils clatter to the metal table. Mom turns around, fury burning in her blue eyes. “Canned? All these years you thought I was serving
canned
frosting to our customers?”

“Well, not completely canned. I thought you did it like that Semi-Homemade gal on the Food Network. You know, the one who will add a drop of lemon to canned vanilla frosting? Or a little cinnamon to the chocolate.” I shrug. “Sorry. I thought it would be really complicated and time consuming to make your own frosting.”

Mom closes her eyes briefly and takes a deep breath. “Candy,” she says, very slowly, pressing her palms to the metal table, “we make everything—
everything
—from scratch. Got that?”

I nod.

“Good. Now get over here.”

With my proverbial tail between my legs, I cross the room to my mother. She’s clearly not happy with me. There’s a giant chip on her shoulder now, and she’s acting business-like all of a sudden. I make a mental note to think before I speak in the future.

“We start much the same way as we did with the batter. Cream the butter.” I watch intently as she turns on the mixer and starts to measure out other ingredients. “One cup of powdered sugar at a time…and a tablespoon of milk to moisten as needed. Salt…vanilla…” She dips her finger in and gives it a little taste. “And one more tablespoon of milk. Give it a try.”

I dip my pinky in and bring the frosting to my mouth. Good God. How could I have ever thought this was canned?

“Good?” Mom asks.

“Perfect. So now we just sit back and wait for the cakes to be done?”

Mom gives me a look that says I’m so far off the mark it’s not even funny. “Nice try.” She turns around and pulls stuff out from under the giant island table in the middle of the room. “Now we garnish. This is the hard part, so please pay extra special attention, Candy.”

The hard part? I’m screwed.

The last thing mom retrieves is a bag of lemons. She pulls a few out of the bag and sets them on the table in front of us. “We’re going to candy these.”

“Candy?”

“Yes, you’ve seen the little candied fruits on top of the cupcakes, haven’t you?”

I’m not about to tell her that I thought they were all store bought. “Oh, right, of course,” I say instead, trying to play off my ignorance as best I can. “So, what do we do?”

“First, we slice. You want them to be about a quarter to an eighth of an inch thick.” She demonstrates and I’m impressed by her knife skills. Each slice is exactly the same width as the next. “Then we drop them into the boiling water for about three minutes.”

When did she put water on to boil? And where did that stove come from, anyway?

I tap my fingernails on the metal table as I watch her move the slices around in the boiling water. No timer goes off, and she doesn’t even look at a watch or clock, but somehow she just knows they’re done.

“Now we drain them and move them into cold water. Meanwhile, I have another cup of water boiling in that pan over there. Do you think you can add the sugar?”

“Of course!” I say. How hard can it be to add a little sugar to some water?

“One cup, and then give it a whisk.”

“No problem.” I follow Mom’s instructions and then stand back as she brings the lemon slices over and drops them into the boiling sugar water.

“Now we reduce the heat and let them simmer for an hour. After that we’ll put them on a drying rack and let them dry overnight.”

“Oh,” I say, surprised. “But don’t we have to get the order out today?”

“I have some already made up, but I had to teach you sometime, didn’t I?” She retrieves a Tupperware container from the fridge that’s filled with candied lemons.

The timer goes off on the oven and Mom glides over to it with the finesse of someone who’s been doing this for…well, for thirty years, I guess. She dons her oven mitt, removes the cupcakes and sets them on the table, then quickly deposits each one onto a cooling rack. They all look perfect and my head swells with pride that I was the one to fill the liners. I’m a bit surprised at the excitement it gives me to see my cupcakes all laid out, but I totally think I could get used to this.