Read Battered to Death (Daphne Martin Cake Mysteries) Online
Authors: Gayle Trent
Battered to Death (Daphne Martin Cake Mysteries) (10 page)
As it turned out, I went by the children’s table first. Leslie’s cheeseburger-and-fries cake had accumulated quite a few pennies, but I made a mental note to get some change after the cake carving demonstration so I could further contribute to the
voting process. No one had said spectators could only vote once, and I saw plenty of relatives dumping pennies into cups. I didn’t want Leslie to feel that her own family had let her down. Besides, I knew the pennies were going to a good cause. They were being collected for donation to the local food bank.
My cakes seemed to be doing well from a spectator-penny-vote point of view as well. I only hoped the judges would be as generous as the spectators. I was sizing up the other cakes in the three-dimensional novelty cake category when Myra rushed up to me and almost knocked me sideways.
“Congratulations on winning the beach cake contest,” she said.
“Thanks!” I smiled.
“I knew you could do it. What did that nasty little Pauline Wilson say when you won?” she asked. “I know she said
something,
but I couldn’t hear what it was.”
“She said she couldn’t believe I won.” I shrugged. “Frankly, I thought Lou Gimmel deserved the grand prize, but I’m glad the judges disagreed.”
“Lou Gimmel,” Myra said. “His was the one with the surfboards and the sand castle, right?”
“That’s the one,” I said.
“It was pretty . . . not as pretty as yours, of course, but it was my second pick,” she said.
I gave her a one-armed hug. “Thanks. Oh, by the way, Lou gave me the ten-dollar coupon to Tanya’s
salon that was in his prize basket. He has a buzz cut and lives in South Carolina, so he didn’t feel he had a use for it.”
“Probably not,” she said.
“Do you want it?” I asked.
“Sure!”
I took it from my purse and handed it to her. “Would you mind considering it partial payment for all the detective work you’re doing on my behalf ?”
“I’ll be happy to.” She frowned slightly. “Of course, Mark is helping too. You think I should give him the coupon?”
“Nah. I’ll bake him a cake,” I said.
“Ooh, then I’ll get a double win!” She giggled. “I can get my hair done and help him eat his cake!”
I laughed before glancing at my watch. “I’d better eat right quick.” I took the protein bar from my purse, opened it, and took a bite.
“That’s lunch, honey?” Myra asked.
I nodded.
“Make Ben buy you a nice dinner, then,” she said.
“Have you heard any chatter about Chef Richards?” I asked.
“Not anything specific. Everybody seems to agree that he was a jerk. Mark is looking into the ex-wife’s whereabouts.” Myra gazed around the room. “He said he’d come by and let me know as soon as he finds out something.”
I swallowed. “Thank you. I appreciate that. I
wish it would be something as simple as a murder of passion carried out by an angry ex-wife. Then I’d be off the hook, and everything would be hunky-dory. I’m just afraid I’m not that lucky.”
“Well . . . we can hope.” Myra took a tissue out of her purse. “Here. You’ve got chocolate on your face.” She wiped my face with the tissue. “Let me see your teeth.”
I glanced around self-consciously before baring my teeth to Myra.
“They’re good,” she said.
I gave her a quick hug before I hurried away. I might have a distant relationship with my own mom, but Myra more than makes up for it in times like these.
B
Y THE
time spectators had begun filling up the metal folding chairs and risers in front of the demonstration table, I had a fairly firm grasp on how I was going to carry out the carving to make the cake look like a delivery van. When I’d done an antique pink Cadillac cake for the Elvis impersonators’ convention a couple of months back, I’d used a stencil made from an enlarged photo of the exact type of car I was trying to replicate. With the van, it would be mostly guesswork. A van wouldn’t be as complicated as a vintage car, though. I also wouldn’t be
doing the van as a three-dimensional cake—simply carving it into the shape of a van in order to illustrate the technique—so I was pretty confident I’d be able to pull it off.
About five minutes before my demonstration was to begin, an event volunteer hurried over to hook me up to a wireless microphone. I thanked him, and the audience tittered as my voice thundered throughout the ballroom. The volunteer adjusted the volume on my mike.
“Good afternoon,” I said. “I’m Daphne Martin, and I’ll be showing you how to carve rectangular layer cakes into the shape of a van. I’m a last-minute replacement for the person who was supposed to do this demonstration, so I have no idea what he’d planned to do. However, I’ll do my best to teach you how to carve the cake and to answer any questions you might have.” I looked around at the audience. “Does anyone have any questions prior to my starting the demonstration?”
A lady raised her hand and asked what the best types of cake for carving were.
“For carving flat cakes, just about any type of cake will do fine,” I answered. “However, if you’re carving a three-dimensional cake, you’ll need a denser, sturdier cake, such as a Madeira or pound cake.”
A muscular young man asked if the cake needed to be frozen prior to carving.
“That’s entirely a matter of personal preference,”
I said. “It can also depend on how much time the baker has. Sometimes you get an order, and you need to carve something and have it ready quickly. At other times, you can make the cake at a more leisurely pace. I prefer the cakes to have been in the refrigerator, so they’re firmer than they would be at room temperature, but not frozen when I carve.”
Clea Underwood piped up from the back of the audience with, “I understand that Chef Richards was supposed to do this demo before he was . . . well, before he
died
. . . . Is that correct?”
“It is,” I said. “And now, if you’ll please hold the remainder of your questions until after the demonstration—or during, if you have a relevant question about the procedure—then I’ll go ahead and begin carving our delivery van cake.”
I spread a chocolate ganache filling on one of the long, rectangular pound cakes and then placed the other cake on top of it. “If I’d planned on doing this van as a three-dimensional cake, then I’d have cut the two cakes in half to make two additional cakes and then stacked them to facilitate sculpting all four sides of the cake. The van would have been smaller, but it would’ve stood upright. This cake will be larger and, in fact, easier to create.”
I explained how cake carving is a lot like sculpting in that one starts with a larger design and then refines it to take the desired shape. I roughed out the outline of a van and then kept chiseling until the audience could see it too.
Someone immediately asked about cake pops. I was surprised by the question, since cake pops are so popular these days. Still, I explained that cake pops were cake mixed with frosting, formed into balls or some other shape, placed onto a lollipop stick, and then dipped into a candy coating.
I crumb-coated the cake and then covered it in white fondant. I cut around the windshield, windows, and wheels and used various cake tips to ice those details. Then I took a fine brush dipped in pink gel color and wrote
Daphne’s Delectable Cakes
on the side of the van. I rinsed the brush, dipped it in black gel color, and outlined the letters in my logo before drawing the silhouette of a wedding cake beneath it.
I turned to the audience with a flourish. “And there you have it. Any other questions?”
“Why did you paint on the cake rather than use a writing tip?” asked a woman to my left.
“I wanted the writing on the van to look more like my logo and less like writing on a cake,” I said. “I wanted it to appear more realistic. That’s a wonderful plus to using fondant—you can paint some beautiful designs on it that you’d be hard-pressed to re-create in icing.”
“Great job, Aunt Daphne,” Leslie said.
“Yeah,” Lucas said. He grinned. “The only way you could’ve made it any better would be to have the headlights and horn work.”
I tilted my head toward Alex. “I wouldn’t even know how to begin to do that. Would you, Alex?”
He nodded, and then looked up at his mother.
Molly encouraged him to tell me how to incorporate lights into my design.
Alex spoke so softly that we all had to lean closer in order to hear him. “Before covering the cake with fondant, you could’ve carved a little hole where the headlight would be. Then you would have put a battery-powered LED light into the hole.” He looked at Lucas. “The same principle would apply to the horn. Just put some battery-operated device into the cake where you could push a button and hear the horn blow. It’s not hard.”
“Cool!” Lucas shouted. “You’re like Chef Duff and Buddy the Cake Boss and all those other guys rolled into one!”
Alex smiled slightly and then lowered his head. “It’s not hard,” he repeated. “You’d just have to be careful that no one got a piece of cake with a mechanical device in it. That could be dangerous.”
“You’ve got to see the video of Alex making the haunted-house cake,” Leslie said. “He did an awesome job!”
“Maybe I can see it later,” I said.
Alex shrugged.
I wondered if we might be putting a bit too much stress on him with all our attention, so I asked Leslie if she’d like to go check on our cakes before Lou Gimmel’s figure molding demonstration.
“I guess.” She sighed. “I’m getting kinda nervous about the whole thing.”
Alex shook his head. “Your cake is good. You’ll be fine.”
She smiled at him. “Thank you.”
Molly gave me a grateful look over the top of their heads. I smiled and nodded. Hopefully, Leslie was just what the doctor had ordered to get Alex back to baking again.
As Leslie took me by the arm and propelled me toward the kids’ division cakes, Myra headed us off.
“That nasty little Clea Underwood is going to keep on until I knock the ever-lovin’ taste out of her mouth,” she said.
I grinned. “She does wear a bit thin on the nerves, doesn’t she?”
“She just wants to try to scoot poor Doug out of that head anchor chair, and she believes this is the story that’ll do it for her,” Myra said. “Well, I’ve got
news for Ms. Clean Underwear, everybody in Brea Ridge prefers Doug to her—always has and always will. She’s lucky Channel Two lets her do the spots she does get.”
“I agree,” I said.
“Leslie, can I borrow your aunt for just a second?” Myra asked.
“Sure.” Leslie looked around at Violet.
“I’ll take her on to the cakes,” Violet said. “We’ll either meet you over there or we’ll see you at the figure molding demo.”
“All right,” I said. “Thanks.” As soon as they were out of earshot, I turned to Myra. “What’s up?”
Before she could answer, Chef Richards’s assistant, Fiona, joined us. She had a small purse on her arm that matched her hair perfectly. Otherwise, she was once again dressed all in white. “Hi. You did a great job with the van cake. It looks fantastic.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“And you were excellent at explaining everything as you went along,” Fiona said. “Have you done many demonstrations?”
“No, but I’ve attended my fair share.” I smiled.
“You aren’t looking for an assistant, are you?” she asked.
I shook my head. “If I were, though, you’d be at the top of my list.” I introduced Fiona to Myra.
“What was it like working for Jordan Richards?” Myra asked Fiona. “Was he as big a jerk to you as he was to everyone else?”
“Bigger,” said Fiona with a slight grin. Then she shrugged. “The pay was good, though.”
“What will you do now?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I might branch out on my own.”
“You should,” I told her. “From what I saw Thursday, you’re every bit as skilled as Chef Richards was . . . probably more so. You did everything for him.”
“I’m a good baker,” Fiona admitted. “But I have trouble getting up and talking in front of people . . . or even in front of a camera crew. There’s no way I could have handled that carving demonstration as well as you did. I’d have been so nervous, my hands wouldn’t have held steady long enough to cut the cake.”
“Oh, honey, you can overcome your fear of public speaking,” said Myra. “I once knew a man who stuttered worse than Mel Gibson . . . No, wait, it was Mel Tillis who stuttered, wasn’t it? Anyway, he got over his fear and started talking just as plain as anybody. He did that club where everybody toasts each other.” She shrugged. I tried not to laugh at her description of the Friars Club. “Besides, if audiences could put up with Chef Richards being such a creep, they’d love you with your funky hair and cool persona.”
Fiona smiled again. “I don’t know about that. . . . Besides, not
everyone
could put up with Chef Richards, or else he’d still be here, wouldn’t he?”
“Thanks,” said Fiona. “I will.”
When Fiona walked away, I turned back to Myra. “Now, what were you getting ready to tell me earlier?”
“Well, first of all, Mark hasn’t been able to find Jordan Richards’s ex-wife,” she said. “It’s like the woman simply disappeared about six months ago.”
I frowned. “That’s weird. Do you think she left the country? Changed her name? Had some sort of . . . accident?”
“She hasn’t had an accident that anyone knows about,” Myra said. “If she had, there’d be a record of it. She isn’t listed as a missing person either. Mark said he’d keep digging. With it being the weekend, his sources are limited.”
“What does he think happened to her?” I asked.
“He doesn’t know and would prefer not to speculate until he has more information.” Myra’s reply was so pat that I knew it had to have been copied from Mark verbatim.
“That’s really strange,” I said. “I hope she’s okay.”
“So do I,” Myra said. “The other thing I wanted to tell you about was that I’ve been checking around about Nickie Zane. Not many people around here know her, but . . . ” Myra sighed.
“But what?” I asked.
“Because Nickie wouldn’t break up with her high school sweetheart,” I said with a sigh. “Ben told me that much. He loved her, Myra. . . . He wanted to marry her.”
“Only because he didn’t have you anymore. Remember that.”
“I’m trying, but it’s hard,” I said. “Now she needs his help, and he’s ready to go running back to her.”
“Not necessarily,” said Myra. “You told me he said he had a week to think about it, didn’t you?”
I nodded.
“If he was still head over heels for that woman, he wouldn’t need a week to think about it,” she said. “He wouldn’t need a minute. He’d have accepted the job when she offered it.”
“I guess,” I said. “I don’t want to think about Ben and Nickie Zane right now, though. It’s too depressing. I keep going back to the worst-case scenario. Have you found out anything else about Chef Richards?”
Myra grinned. “That’s my girl. Her love life is depressing, so let’s talk about murder.”
I giggled. “When you put it like that, it sounds really bad.”
“It
is
bad,” she said. “Wicked bad, as the kids would say.”
I wondered if that was truly what the kids would say. Somehow I doubted it. “Hey, my life could be on the line in that capacity too if we don’t find out who the real killer is,” I reminded her. “My career could be ruined or, worse, I could wind up arrested for a crime I didn’t commit. Don’t forget, my fingerprints were on that cake stand.”
“I know, honey. I’m only teasing you,” said Myra. “It’s good to see you smile. Mark is looking into the backgrounds of all the students who were in Chef Richards’s class, based on the names and locations you provided him. He’s also continuing the search for the former Mrs. Richards and scouring the Internet to see who had ongoing feuds with the chef.”
“It might be easier to find out who
didn’t
have an ongoing feud with him,” I said. “I haven’t heard anyone at this cake show utter a single kind word about the man. And he’s
dead
. People are usually reluctant to speak ill of the dead. But not in Chef Richards’s case.”
“From what I’ve been hearing, it’s hard for them to find anything nice to say,” she said.
