Page 1 of Strawberry Kisses

Chapter One

Patrick

There was something calming about the chaos of a kitchen in the middle of service.

It sounded like madness with Aaron shouting somewhere and the hustle and bustle of chefs and servers moving in a calculated dance. The sizzle of pans on the burners, the continuous hum of the ovens, the clatter of crockery, and Antoni and Oli’s arguing and off-pitch singing from the pot-wash room. It was all familiar and comforting.

The pastry kitchen was, for the moment, a tiny bit quieter, but that was because we were only thirty minutes into service, and nobody had ordered pudding yet. Not that there wasn’t plenty to do. I’d been chopping fruit and whipping cream for miniature pavlovas for the past hour. Deseeding twenty passion fruit and another ten pomegranates was a pain in the ass and had taken a ton of time.

One day I’d get a sous-chef on service with me who I’d be able to ask to do it. Even though we’d been open for four years, The Pear Tree was still a growing restaurant, and I wasn’t sure adding additional pastry staff would happen anytime soon. When we’d first opened, I’d done everything myself, and on my days off, it had been up to Aaron to assign someone to cover puddings. Now we were lucky enough to have two pastry chefs, so I didn’t have to work every weekend, even if Ben and Aaron had had to pry me out of the kitchen at first.

We’d even refitted one of the small, side spaces into a dedicated pastry kitchen. It was barely bigger than a cupboard and hotter than the sun because of the oven, but that didn’t matter because it was mine.

Even if I couldn’t swing a cat in here without hitting something.

“Patrick,” said a cheerful voice from behind me. I turned to see Lucy, one of the waitstaff, grinning at me from the edge of the pastry kitchen. The waitstaff all knew not to set foot in here without my permission, but unlike Aaron, our head chef and one of my best friends, I didn’t enforce the rule with violent swearing.

“Hi, Lucy. Busy service?” I kept chopping strawberries as I talked. These days, the task was as natural as breathing.

“Packed, same as normal for a Sunday.” She sighed. “I just wanted to warn you that we’ve got a birthday they didn’t warn us about. Someone from the party just asked if we could do a special dessert plate. Any chance?”

I glanced at the little piping bags of chocolate I kept on a plate on top of the oven, which kept them at the perfect temperature. They were full, and I had enough bits to put a birthday plate together—especially since I’d had some warning. The worse thing was trying to do one while also trying to fill ten other pudding orders.

“Sure, just let me know when you want it. I’ll do it now and put it to the side. Any allergies?”

“Not that they told me. You’re a star, Chef.”

“It’s fine,” I said, scooping the diced strawberries into a tub and tipping the stalks into the nearby compost bin. “Just go grab me a couple of the rectangular glass plates from the storage rack. I don’t have any in here.”

Lucy disappeared, and I began looking in my two little under-the-counter fridges to see what I could easily put on the plate, hoping I wasn’t going to have to make the trip down the corridor to my walk-in fridge. I tried to get everything in here before service so I didn’t have to go back and forth all the time, but it didn’t always happen the way I’d planned. There was nothing that spelt a recipe for disaster like a busy, narrow corridor and a large tray of desserts.

Luckily, I had enough cream and fruit to make an extra miniature pavlova as well as a slice of lemon tart I could cut in half, a couple of macaroons, and a couple of small brownie bars. Add a little decoration and it would be good to go.

When I looked up, I noticed Lucy had left me a stack of plates on the silver service rack that formed half the wall onto the corridor between the kitchens. I grabbed one and plated up the desserts. I’d add the final touches, including ‘Happy Birthday’ piped in chocolate, when Lucy came to collect it. Then the front of house staff could add one of the sparkler candles to it before it went out.

As soon as I finished the dessert plate, I looked up to see my first ticket of the day sitting on the service rack, tucked into a little holder. Two crème brûlée—nice and simple to kick things off. I grabbed my blow torch and the golden caster sugar, plus two vanilla and raspberry brûlées out of the fridge, carefully caramelising the sugar into a perfect crispy shell. I added a little fruit to each plate and popped them onto the pass. Two seconds later, Callum appeared to collect them, giving me a half-smile before calling, “Thanks, Chef” as he bustled out of the kitchen.

After that, things settled into the regular rhythm of a Sunday lunch service.

It was a busy one, as Lucy had said, but nothing unusual happened. We had a lot of puddings ordered, and at one point I thought I was going to run out of lemon tart, but that was about it. It gave me a chance to start thinking about the week ahead, and what I wanted to make.

I was lucky because, as the head pastry chef, I got the final say in what we made, and Aaron, who was also co-owner with Ben as well as head chef, pretty much gave me free rein to do what I wanted. Not that Darcie, the other pastry chef, really minded. She wasn’t long out of culinary college and was still eager to learn. She had a great palette and a creative mind though, and we already worked well together.

My mind ticked back to thinking about next week and next weekend, the first weekend in July. I had a nagging feeling there was something important happening, but I couldn’t remember what it was.

In a quiet moment towards the end of service, I grabbed the huge diary I used to keep notes about what we were serving, and Darcie and I used to leave each other messages, off the windowsill. It was a bit old fashioned, but I still hadn’t found anything as useful for keeping track of things like a good old diary the size of a brick. I flicked through until I found the following Saturday and saw neatly printed capitals across the top of the page.

PATRICK OFF. FAMILY PARTY - TAKE CAKE.

Feck. I’d forgotten about the party.

Or rather, I’d shoved it far into the recesses of my mind and pretended it wasn’t happening.

It was my parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary and my dad’s seventieth birthday, and my family was throwing a giant party to celebrate with the whole of my extended family and a load of friends. They were having the party catered, but they’d made me promise to bring a cake. I wasn’t a professional cake decorator by any stretch of the imagination, but I could do a good enough job. My mum had insisted, and because I was a good son and a complete pushover, I’d agreed.

Well, that was one thing to add to my list for the week: find time to make a giant cake. Then find a way to get it all the way to Devon. Maybe Aaron had some sort of cool box I could borrow. Or maybe I could just take it in pieces and finish assembling it in mum’s kitchen. That would probably be easiest. I knew my mum wouldn’t object.

If I was honest, the cake was the least of my worries about the party.

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