Final Sentence (38 page)

(makes 30–36 cookies)

4 ounces butter, softened

1 cup flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

½ teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon sugar

1 teaspoon cayenne pepper

1 cup shredded Cheddar cheese (4 ounces), at room temperature 1 teaspoon water, if needed

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

Cut the butter into the flour, baking powder, salt, sugar, and cayenne pepper. Mix in the cheese.

Chill. Roll onto a board using a rolling pin (and a dusting of extra flour to keep the mixture from sticking).

Cut with cookie cutters. (Note from Katie: To make this easier, roll out the dough and cut into a checkerboard. This makes square cookies.)

Place the cookies on an ungreased cookie sheet.

Bake the cookies for 8–9 minutes, until lightly browned.

Serve with jam, if desired. The jam cuts the spiciness.

From Jenna:

One of Katie’s favorite serving tips is to put candies alongside cookies on a cookie platter. She says the eye is drawn to the variety of shapes. These little beauties (another from my friend Desiree’s cookbook) are the easiest things in the world to make. I like Tootsie Rolls, but I also adore chocolate and peanut butter. Especially the chunky kind. And when I need a quick pick-me-up, one will do. Peanut butter has lots of protein, right? That makes me feel like this is almost a “healthy” snack. I have to admit that I wasn’t so sure about paraffin. I mean, I’ve used that to make candles. But in Desiree’s book, she assures the reader that paraffin is used in all sorts of things, like canning and such. You sure can’t taste it.

Chocolate Peanut Butter Crisp Bonbons

à la Desiree

(makes 24–30 candies)

1 cup peanut butter

2 cups powdered sugar

½ cup butter, softened

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 cup chopped Rice Krispies

1 (12-ounce) package dark chocolate chips

2 tablespoons paraffin

Beat together the peanut butter, powdered sugar, butter, vanilla, and Rice Krispies (gluten-free, if needed).

Form into small balls, smaller than walnuts, and place on a tray lined with waxed paper.

Set the tray of balls in the refrigerator while preparing the chocolate chips.

Melt the chocolate and paraffin in the top of a double boiler, or in a saucepan set over another larger saucepan, the bottom pan half-filled with hot water (not boiling).

Remove the balls from the refrigerator. Reshape them so they are smooth and round, which is much easier to do now that they are cold. Dip the bonbons in chocolate mixture. (Super tip: Use 2 forks to handle the balls. This makes them easy to turn when coating. Even I could do it.) Return the bonbons to the waxed paper. Cool completely.

Store in an airtight container.

TURN THE PAGE FOR A PREVIEW OF DARYL WOOD GERBER’S NEXT COOKBOOK NOOK MYSTERY . . .

Inherit the Word

COMING SOON FROM BERKLEY PRIME CRIME!

I
CLAMBERED DOWN THE
ladder in the storeroom of The Cookbook Nook, carrying a stack of cookie cookbooks in my arms. My foot hit something soft. I shrieked. Tigger, a kitten that had scampered into my life and won my heart a month ago, yowled. His claws skittered beneath him as he dashed from my path.

“Shh, Tigger. Hush, baby.” I had barely touched him with my toe. I knew he wasn’t hurt. “C’mere, little guy.” I arrived at the floor, knelt down, and spied him hunkering beneath the ladder, staring at me with his wide eyes. “It’s okay,” I cooed. As I scooped him up, one-armed, and nuzzled his neck, I felt a cool stream of the unknowable course its way up my spine. Tigger was a ginger-striped tabby, not a black cat, so passing beneath a ladder wasn’t a bad omen, was it? Why did I suddenly feel like seven years of bad luck was lurking in the shadows?

“Miss Jenna, yoo-hoo,” a girl squealed. “Miss Jenna, come quick!”

Fear ticked inside me. We had invited children to The Cookbook Nook for a cookie-decorating event—my Aunt Vera’s idea. She was a master cookie baker herself, with an extensive personal collection of cookie cookbooks. Had one of the children gotten hurt? Was that the dark cloud I’d sensed in the storeroom? I raced into the shop and skidded to a slippery halt in my flip-flops.

“Look at my killer shark.” The girl with frothy orange hair was standing beside a tot-height table in the children’s corner, brandishing a deep blue, shark-shaped cookie.

Nothing amiss. Kids being kids. No one hurt.
Thank the breezes
, as my mother used to say.

I steadied my racing heart and said, “Cool!” I set the cookbooks on the sales counter, then put Tigger on the floor and gave his bottom a push. Brave feline, he meandered beneath the children’s table, probably hoping to score a crumb. “But please, kids, call me Jenna. Not Miss. I’m not a teacher.”

The girl’s father frowned. Guess he preferred decorum. I wasn’t so hot on it. I liked to live fast and loose . . . sort of.

“But you’re so tall,” the girl said.

I grinned. I wasn’t an Amazon, but at five-eight, I was slightly taller than her doughy father. “Teachers can be short, too.”

“If you say so.”

The first Friday of September was a perfect time in Crystal Cove to invite children to a cookie-decorating class. The weather hovered in the low seventies. Nearly every day by midmorning, the sun shone brightly. And school and homework hadn’t taken over the kids’ total concentration, quite yet. For the class, in addition to ordering a fresh batch of cookie cookbooks like
The All-American Cookie Book
,
Betty Crocker The Big Book of Cookies
, and
Simply Sensational Cookies
, we had stocked up on fun cookie-decorating sets complete with squeezable icing bottles and interchangeable design tips. Our theme for today’s class was creatures of the deep.

“Did you bake the cookies, Jenna?” one of the parents asked.

“Me? What a laugh.” I still wasn’t adept at making cookie batter—my limit of ingredients for recipes was a
daring
total of seven—but as an occasional artist, I totally embraced piping icing out of a squeeze bottle.

“Miss Jenna, look at my octopus.” A little boy with gigantic freckles wiggled his green, gooey octopus cookie in the air, and then shoved his gruesome creation toward the face of the frothy-haired girl. She squealed.

Aunt Vera, a flamboyant sixty-something and co-owner of The Cookbook Nook, moved to my side, the fabric of her exotic caftan billowing and falling. “Don’t you love kids?”

Me? I adored them. Except for the time I did an ad campaign at Taylor & Squibb, my previous employer, for Dipsy Doodles. A few prankster boys squeezed the contents of their glue and glitter pens onto the girls’ clothing and—
gag me
—hair. Parents were livid.

“Yoo-hoo, Jenna. Kids?” my aunt repeated.

“Uh, sure. Love ’em.” I didn’t want any of my own. Not yet. I wasn’t quite thirty. And a widow. Timing was everything. I said, “Absolutely. How about you?”

She adjusted the silver bejeweled turban on her head—my aunt would prefer to give tarot card readings than figure out how to market our joint enterprise—and chuckled. “I would have loved to have a dozen. Just like you.”

“Aw. I love you, too.” My aunt, on my father’s side, had doted on me from the day I was born. When I moved back to Crystal Cove to help her open the cookbook shop, she offered me the cottage beside her beach house. I felt blessed to have her in my life, especially with my mother gone.

“While the kiddies finish up,” Aunt Vera said, “let’s discuss the town’s other ventures for this week.”

“As far as I know, the mayor has planned a dozen new events for the month of September, including a Frisbee contest, a paddleboarding race, and Movie Night on the Strand.” Crystal Cove was a lovely seaside town on the coast of California with beautiful rolling hills to the east and a glorious stretch of ocean running the length of the town to the west. The mayor of our fair city was always on the lookout for events that would lure tourists. “To pay tribute to the events the mayor has fashioned, I’ve ordered dozens of new cookbooks with beach and/or movie themes.”

“Good idea. You’ve included
The Beach House Cookbook
, I assume?”

“I have.”
The Beach House Cookbook
had beautiful photographs of food and the seaside. Cookbooks with enticing pictures, in our business, were guaranteed sales. I still couldn’t believe it, but some people bought cookbooks merely to peruse. Prior to my new enterprise, I was a function and use person. If it didn’t have a function, I didn’t use it. “I’ve also brought in
At Blanchard’s Table: A Trip to the Beach Cookbook
.” This particular cookbook included recipes that were as delicious as they were simple. Prosciutto bundles? Balsamic goat cheese? They sounded easy enough that even I could make them. “Also, I ordered
Good Fish: Sustainable Seafood Recipes from the Pacific Coast
.” The Seattle-based author of
Good Fish
was a seafood advocate who really educated her readers. I especially loved that she had brought in another knowledgeable source to pair the fish with wine.

“That title’s a mouthful.”

“Between you, me, and the lamppost,” I said, “some titles on cookbooks go on forever.”

“They do, but competition is fierce and specificity matters. An unpretentious title like
Good Food
won’t light a fire under the audience intended.”

My aunt was right. She was always right. She knew cookbooks backward and forward. Me? I was just getting the hang of how popular they were. At my aunt’s behest, I had returned to Crystal Cove to run The Cookbook Nook and café because, well, my life in San Francisco, as I’d dreamed it, was over. I needed a new beginning. My aunt needed a marketing whiz.

“I love what you’ve done in the bay window,” Aunt Vera said.

Our store was one of many in Crystal Cove Fisherman’s Village. The bay window faced the parking lot and was our first calling card to passersby. In keeping with the town’s monthly events, I had set out a seaside–themed display, complete with bright yellow oars, aqua blue Frisbees, and coral and white sand toys. On a table by the decorative kitchen items that we carried, I had set up our movie-themed table, which included the women’s fiction books
Chocolat
and
Like Water for Chocolate,
both of which had been made into movies, and a mystery series about a cheese shop, which I heard might become a television show à la
Murder, She Wrote.

“Jenna.” My best friend and new assistant in the store, Bailey Bird—Minnie Mouse in size and Mighty Mouse in energy—hurried into the shop. “Whee. You’ll never guess.” She gripped my hands and spun me around. The skirt of her silky halter dress fluted around her well-formed calves. Sun streaming in the big plate-glass windows highlighted her short copper hair. “I just spoke with the mayor, and she wants us.”

“For what?”

“To hold the Grill Fest.”

“But Brick’s always hosts the Grill Fest.” Brick’s was a barbecue restaurant about a half mile from Fisherman’s Village.

“Brick’s is going under. It just declared bankruptcy.”

“Oh, no. That’s horrible.”

“It is, isn’t it? Tragic. However, the mayor doesn’t want to delay the fest. She’s afraid that could hurt the town’s economy,” Bailey rushed on. “Tourism—”

“Can’t afford any setbacks,” I finished, quoting the mayor.

“It takes money to run this place, she says. The squeaky wheel gets the biggest piece of the pie.”

“Now you’re mixing metaphors.”

“The mayor said it.”

Our mayor, a frizzy bundle of raw energy, was nothing if not Crystal Cove proactive. Without tourists and the taxes they paid, how else could we finance our infrastructure? Only ten thousand people, including part-timers, lived here. Though many residents had incomes well above normal, the town still couldn’t manage to maintain the elaborate maze of windy roads, the parks, the aquarium, the city college that specialized in the study of grapes—truly—and The Pier, which was a major go-to spot, complete with a boardwalk, restaurants, stores, and more.