The Traveling Tea Shop (2 page)

I look up at my clock. 1:30
P.M.
My stomach flips like a pancake. Or should I say PamCake?

In just ninety minutes I am meeting England’s most beloved baker, Pamela Lambert-Leigh. Can you believe it’s nearly twenty years since Babycakes made her a household name? Those mini fairy cakes were so whisper-light that I used to think of them as dandelion clocks—one puff and you’d send a flurry of vanilla sponge crumbs out into the ether. Her daughter’s cherubic face gave the packaging such an innocent, Shirley Temple vibe. Forget those sticky-sickly treats that made you groan and go cross-eyed, a Babycake was just a little kiss on your button nose, a butterfly in your tummy . . .

You could eat six and barely even feel sick.

I know because my mum once spelled out my name—LAURIE—one letter per cake on my birthday. I was rather miffed when she did the same three months later for my sister Jessica, especially since her name garnered an extra cake.

I was wondering about telling Pamela this story, possibly leaving out the fact that my sister and I were teenagers by this point, but I don’t want to come off as overly fan-ish. Besides, what if she made a casual inquiry about my nearest and dearest? My response would only make her uncomfortable—“Both women are gone now,” I would say. “One to heaven and one to hell.”

But no dwelling on that today. I mentally will the avalanche of emotion to retreat and hold off a while longer. I’ll get to you soon enough; for now I need to keep things bright and peppy and focus on the interview . . .

Perhaps I’ll just make a joke about having a sweet tooth: “The amount of sugar I consumed as a child, it’s a miracle I have any teeth left at all!”

Hmmm. That sounds a bit off-putting.

What about, “We used to say that instead of blood running through my veins I had syrup, like a mini maple tree. With legs.”

I tut myself. I’m not auditioning for a stand-up show.

I just want to prove to her that I’m Cake’s Biggest Fan. Not some pretender who’ll toy with the slim end of the wedge, leaving a great bookend of frosting on the plate.

Which reminds me, I’m sure I’ve got a childhood picture here of me taking a bite out of a cake that’s twice the size of my head. I could snap it and have it neatly to hand on my phone.

I rifle through my desk drawer, I saw it just the other day . . .

I hesitate as I locate it. My hair in pigtails, white Peter Pan collar on my red dress. I must have been about seven. Gosh. Thirty-one years ago.

I didn’t know about calories then.

I knew the truth about Father Christmas. I knew about divorce and that I couldn’t bear to see my mother crying—it would just scrunch me up inside and make me want to cry too—but I didn’t know any of those threatening phrases like:

“A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips.”

Or “You can never be too rich, or too thin!”

Or, the most insidious of all, “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.”

Whoever said that has clearly never been to Magnolia Bakery.

Drrrrrinnnng!

My phone ring startles me. But I smile when I see my best friend’s name on the display. I wouldn’t pick up for anyone else right now.

“Krista!” I squeak.

“I don’t want to hold you up, just wanted to wish you good luck!”

“Oh thank you,” I pip. “I don’t know what to do with myself—this feels almost too good to be true!”

“There is no one better suited to this job than you, Laurie. It’s like your greatest passions colliding!”

It really is. Cake and travel.

The travel aspect is my
actual
line of expertise. Before I met Krista, I was one of those all-but-extinct breeds: a travel agent. (RIP Lunn Poly, Marble Arch.) She’s a former magazine journalist and together we launched a girlie travel-planning website called Va-Va-Vacation!, custom-designing itineraries and offering bonus features such as “What I Packed versus What I Actually Wore” and the popular “Man of the World” eye candy section.

We both firmly believe that life is too short and travel too expensive to waste a single coffee-stop in a strip-lit chain when you could be basking in a secret courtyard with a waiter who’s going to slip you a complimentary macaroon. I’m even picky about which airports I schedule a stopover in, because a cool bar with an innovative menu and a docking station at every table beats the congealed orange chicken and plastic forks at Panda Express every time.

I remember Krista saying that if her magazine hadn’t just cut their travel section in favor of running more weight-loss stories, she would have written a column with all our tried-and-tested tips. I said perhaps she should start her own blog. She said she’d love to create an online travel magazine and she knew a designer who could make it really eye-popping, but she couldn’t figure out how to earn a living from it. Which is when we decided to combine our skills.

We’ve done some pretty fun themes to our custom itineraries over the years—dance-themed, family tree, a Starbucks-free coffee tour of Seattle; I even created an entire schedule from Ryan Gosling movie locations for one superfan. (And who can blame her fixation?)

I think one of the reasons the setup works so well is that we have clearly defined roles: I’m mostly in charge of logistics and wangling the discounts that give us a competitive edge. (I began with my personal travel contacts—“Go on, Yiorgos, give us an extra twenty percent off and we’ll give you the best October occupancy the Elounda Blue has ever had!”—and still today we favor privately owned boutique properties over the big chains.) Danielle the designer holds down the fort in London, where Va-Va-Vacation! was founded, and she does all the beach resort reports (even rating the flirtiness of the local bartenders), whereas Krista, our main writer, travels all over—Tahiti, Costa Rica, Argentina . . . She’s currently based in Quebec in Canada—she went there to research their epic Winter Carnival and in between ice-skating and snow-sculpting she fell madly in love with a husky-eyed dogsledder named Jacques. (The guy has a French accent, 112 canine children and can seemingly summon the Northern Lights at will, so she really didn’t stand a chance.)

Around the same time, I got the opportunity to relocate from Maida Vale to Manhattan, and oddly that has worked out really well for our friendship since we are now only a ninety-minute flight apart, as opposed to eight-plus hours had either of us stayed in London.

Not that anything could have persuaded me to miss out on a chance to live in New York; I have been coming here every couple of months for years, on a mission to keep our Va-Va-Vacation! city guide current and comprehensive. I may not have Krista’s pro writing skills, but I pride myself on knowing (and loving) the Big Apple pips, core and all.

Which is why Pamela Lambert-Leigh has come to me. Well, technically her agent set up the meeting. And I’m not the only “travel professional” she is meeting with today. I have rivals. Which is why I am so ultra-keen to prove that no one loves cake as much as me.

“So have you made your final selection for the Cheesecake Challenge?” Krista wants to know.

That’s our big test—each of us has been charged with presenting Pamela with The Ultimate New York Cheesecake Experience. The winner will get the job. But we won’t know exactly what that job entails unless we are the winner. All the more reason to be the best.

I’ve been really torn over my choice. Junior’s gets the popular vote and has all the right credentials: founded in 1950, now with a hub in Times Square offering at least twenty flavors (including Sugar-Free Low Carb!) but the design is a bit orange lino diner and it would mean subjecting her to the tourist crush, so I’m not sure it would be a good fit.

I was fleetingly considering taking Pamela over to Brooklyn for a
Moonstruck
moment but the Cammareri Brothers bakery has since closed and its affiliate F. Monteleone (a bijoux box of old-school treats) has seating as limited as Pamela’s time.

So that narrowed it down to two . . .

“Remember Veniero’s Pasticceria in the East Village?” I prompt Krista. “The one where we took a snap under the vintage neon sign?”

“Est 1894! It’s up on my board here!” she cheers, recalling the ceilings of pressed copper and stained glass. (Personally I was most struck by the never-ending parade of cannolis.)

I had it in my head to wow Pamela with both their traditional New York Cheesecake and the crumblier, less sweet, Sicilian version, which is made using ricotta and looks a bit like a soufflé nestled in a deep-dish pie-crust.

“Double whammy!” Krista enthuses. “And it’s just twenty minutes’ walk from your place.”

“The only thing is . . .” I pause as I call up today’s online news stories. “I saw this paparazzi shot of Pamela at the airport . . .”

I press send.

“Oh gosh!” Krista gasps as she opens the image at her end. “I don’t know that I would have recognized her.”

I had the same reaction. The Pamela we know and love from her
Teatime with Pamela
TV show has always had a delightfully mellow look to her, as if she has just emerged from a stroll in her English rose garden, complete with a freshly plucked flower wound into her soft, wavy blonde hair. In fact her whole product line—the cookbooks, the packaged cake ranges, the signature bakeware—makes you feel connected to a more wholesome time, when life was sweet and simple and you might find yourself spending the afternoon reading in an apple orchard, as opposed to sitting in a technology daze in some office cubicle. Though Pamela typically wears crumpled linens or palest, washed-out denim, she always has a lipstick that precisely matches the design on her pinafore and nails to match that, even though she’ll soon be up to her cuticles in flour and pastry. But this snapshot gives the impression that she ran out of the house in the middle of the night and is still trying to figure out where the hell she is going in such a hurry.

“She looks totally frazzled.”

“I know. And it’s sweltering here today and you know how stingy most places are with their air-conditioning.”

“God yes,” Krista cringes. “Remember when we were at The Boat House and they didn’t even have their ceiling fan on the fastest rotation?”

“I know, the passing waiters were generating more of a breeze.”

“So what are you thinking?”

“Lady M.”

“Lady M?” she queries.

“We haven’t been. I only discovered it two weeks ago but everything about the place is cool and pristine and upmarket zen.”

“Really?”

I nod into the phone. “Five minutes in there and I swear your hair starts to de-frizz. The walls are white, the tables, the chairs, the plates—everything is so clean!”

“Sounds like a lab!”

I chuckle. “You know, they actually call it a cake boutique!”

“How very swish!”

I click on the website just to check for the hundredth time that I have the correct address—41 East 78th, Upper East Side.

“You’re not worried it’ll be too posh?”

I know what Krista means, Pamela is more naturally sun-kissed than lacquered sheen.

“I was,” I confess. “But then I tasted the cheesecake . . .”

“Ooooh. Say no more.”

“Plus she’s staying at the Mandarin Oriental,” I add. “So it’s just across the park.”

“For her; you’re all the way down in Little Italy! Shouldn’t you be leaving?”

“I’m getting a cab in five minutes. No subway today. I’ve booked a table and I’m just going to sit there and be all serene and accommodating of her every whim.”

I don’t think I could be any better prepared. My laptop is primed with multiple open browsers and a list of Favorites linking to everything New York and cake-related. Yesterday I bought a small pink leather-bound notebook and a gold pen. I have a pack of hand-wipes should Pamela want to clean up without trekking to the bathroom, and two small tubes of Fresh’s brown sugar hand cream—one to offer her a squeeze and one to give as a gift if she likes the scent as much as I do. I’ve printed out a pocket-size list of What’s Hot in New York Today, should she perhaps have an hour or two free, and attached my business card: LAURIE DAVIS
Travel In Style.
I’ve even packed a second pair of shoes and a shirtdress in case I fall down a manhole or get knocked over by a bolting horse and carriage on the way.

I have to have every eventuality covered because, if they’ve come to me, my guess is that Pamela needs help planning a detailed itinerary—cramming as much into as few days as is physically and logistically possible, while still maintaining a seemingly effortless flow. And that’s what I do best.

If she’ll just give me the chance to prove myself.

“Trust me, this is your moment!” Krista encourages.

I take a breath. “I really hope so.”

I don’t know when I last wanted anything this much.

Actually I do.

I felt the same way about moving to Manhattan . . .