Page 2 of Peaches & Cream
Ben
“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.” I pull the smoking pile of charcoal across the kitchen and dump it in the sink, turning on the faucet and drowning the whole mess in water. I grit my teeth and let out a low, aggravated growl.Why the fuck am I doing this?
Bleep! Bleep! Bleep!
The smoke alarm is the icing on top of the proverbial cake. “I fucking quit!” I yell, pegging the oven mitt across the kitchen as my sister comes running in from the other room with a broom, waving it under the alarm to get it to stop.
“Chris! Open up some windows,” she instructs her husband, who’s hot on her heels.
A cool early morning breeze whips through the heated kitchen, stealing the smoke away and quieting the alarm, giving me a moment to breathe.
“Thank God,” Stacey sighs, lowering the broom to her side before she turns her concerned eyes to me. “What the hell happened, Ben?”
“I burned the fucking cobbler is what happened,” I say, running my hands through my dark hair, seriously considering pulling it out from the roots.
“And what is wrong with the fifty other cobblers you’ve got lining the benches?” she asks, gesturing to my previous attempts, lining the dining room table. There aren’t fifty. But since I’ve been at this all night, there is a solid dozen.
“I’m trying to get this right,” I say, sucking the air in through my nose. This baking competition is how we’re going to level up our business. We’re currently operating out of an Australian themed food truck on the county fair circuit. If we can get ourselves a bricks and mortar bakery and lay down some roots, my sister won’t have to raise her baby in the back of a stuffy van while constantly on the road.
“Youwillget it right,” she assures me, giving me one of those concerned head tilts our mother used to give us. “You’re the greatest pastry chef I know. If anyone can do this, it’s you.”
“Stace, I’m the only pastry chef you know,” I say, shaking my head as I survey the destruction in the kitchen. “Maybe I should just go back to making meat pies and lamingtons. Stepping out of my comfort zone is obviously too much of an ask.”
She purses her lips together and places her hands on my shoulders, looking me dead in the eyes with her light blue orbs that are exactly like mine. “Imagine if Mum heard you talking in that defeatist tone? She’d tell you that Watsons don’t quit. We battle on, and we do our best—good or bad. Can you battle on?”
I let out a resigned sigh. “I have about enough ingredients to give this one more try,” I say.
“That’s the spirit,” she says, releasing me. “If you can make a sponge that’s so light it’s like eating air, you can conquer a cobbler.”
“This one tastes fucking amazing,” Chris puts in, his mouth full of my sixth attempt at this staple Southern dessert. And it’s because it’s a staple that I know I need to do something fucking amazing to get the judges’ vote.
“What do you like about it?” I ask, moving closer and surveying all of the ‘tasting holes’ he’s put in the rest of the cobblers, compared to the one he’s already half-demolished.
“It’s like a cross between a cake and a cookie and a crumble. And every bite I take, my stomach and my mouth are like, ‘Give me more!’” he says, adding a little monster voice toward the end there for flair. “It’s crack cobbler.”
“OK,” I say, going through my scribbled notes to find the one with a big ‘6’ written in the corner. I write,Crack Cobbleralong the top. “Then I guess this one will be it.”
Stacey beams. “Let’s win this thing.”
