Read The Baking Life of Amelie Day Online
Authors: Vanessa Curtis
The Baking Life of Amelie Day (17 page)
I screw up my face against all these scary thoughts. I wish for about the millionth time that I could just be a normal teenager worrying about exams and spots and boys. I don’t know how I’m going to cope with life now that I’ve removed my great passion of baking from it. I’ve just realised that apart from Harry, baking was the only thing which really helped me cope with my CF. I reckon I was maybe a bit hasty throwing out all my ingredients. A future without Flour Power looms ahead of me, looking bleak and boring and kind of – uncooked.
I look back at the screen and type some more.
But maybe I need to cook myself past the semi-finals of
Best Teen Baker
if I want to achieve my life’s ambition of getting to the final and maybe even winning. After all, I live to bake. If I stop baking, I might stop living. And please carry on sending your recipes. I might ask to borrow them for my best-selling book of the future,
The Amelie Day Book of Baking
.
I snap the computer shut.
A vision of Harry floats in front of my eyes.
‘Mum,’ I say, going downstairs. ‘Can you give me a lift to Karim’s shop?’
Mum’s sitting over the newspaper downstairs. She takes off her glasses and rubs her eyes. Her skin looks dry and tired and her eyes are like slits from lack of sleep.
‘What do you want to buy?’ she says. ‘We’ve got loads of food in the kitchen.’
I roll my eyes and give her an impatient smile.
‘I’ve got to do Harry’s cupcakes,’ I say. ‘I need chocolate, eggs, flour and butter, like NOW.’
My mother’s face lights up and sparkles in the late afternoon sun.
She grabs the car keys and we head outside.
Harry’s Favourite Chocolate Heart Cupcakes
To make 12 of these gorgeous chocolatey treats, you will need:
200g (7oz) self-raising flour
225g (8oz) caster sugar
25g (10z) cocoa powder
100g (3 ½ oz) margarine/butter
2 medium eggs
5 tablespoons of evaporated milk or normal milk
5 tablespoons of water
To decorate:
A family-sized bar of milk chocolate
A small ball of ready-to-roll fondant icing and scarlet food colouring, or chocolate buttons, sprinkles, Jelly Tots or Smarties
Preheat the oven to 180°C/360°F/gas mark 4. Although I call these ‘cupcakes’ if you make them in muffin tins they turn out bigger, which can’t be bad! Put 12 muffin cases into the tin and set aside for later.
Put the margarine/butter into a bowl with the caster sugar and cream these together with a wooden spoon until smooth. Then beat in the eggs, one at a time. Sieve the flour and then add to this mix, beating in until you have a smooth mixture. Then add your cocoa powder (you can add a bit more than 25g (1oz) if you like a stronger chocolate flavour, but I find that this amount is usually about right).
Add in 5 tablespoons of normal milk (if you like your cakes light and springy) or instead, you could use 5 tablespoons of evaporated milk (this gives a much creamier, moister texture, which I think is better). Then finally, add 5 tablespoons of water and beat the mixture until you have a lovely rich, brown chocolate mix.
Spoon the mixture into your prepared muffin tins so that each case is about three quarters filled (the mixture might make more than 12). Slide the tray into the middle of your heated oven and bake for about 20 minutes or until risen and firm.
You can either ice the cakes with icing sugar and water mixed together (and any food colouring you might like to add), or you can do what I like best – melt a family-sized bar of milk chocolate in a bowl over a pan of simmering water, then brush the chocolate all over the top of each little cake.
Harry is very fussy about cupcakes. I once put a red fondant icing heart on one of his cakes and ever since then he kind of expects it. If you like getting your hands covered in food colouring and making a squidgy mess on the worktop, then you could add some drops of scarlet food colouring to a small ball of ready-to-roll fondant icing. Roll it in your hands until you’ve got a ball of pinkish dough, roll it out with a rolling pin and then use a tiny heart-shaped cutter to cut out a pink heart. But be warned, your hands will look like something out of a horror film afterwards.
Or if you actually don’t want to spend hours messing around with hearts, a much easier way to top off the milk chocolate on your cakes is to buy some chocolate buttons or similar and just stick one on top of each cake. Or you could get chocolate sprinkles, or Jelly Tots, or Smarties, or nearly anything you fancy putting on top.
These need to be kept in an airtight tin after they’ve cooled down. But in our house, they never last that long!
Author’s note
The Baking Life of Amelie Day
is a work of fiction based upon my own particular research. It is important to note that Cystic Fibrosis affects different people in different ways. I wrote this book after watching a television documentary about CF. It followed a group of young people who were waiting for life-saving lung transplants and I was touched by the daily struggles they had just to stay alive.
Cystic Fibrosis is a life-shortening genetic condition which slowly destroys the lungs and digestive system, and there’s currently no cure. Only half of sufferers live to celebrate their 40th birthday.
To find out more about Cystic Fibrosis you can contact the Cystic Fibrosis Trust at
or call the CF Trust helpline on
0300 373 1000.
You may also like to follow the blog of Victoria Tremlett who lives with CF at
www.tor-pastthepointofnoreturn.blogspot.co.uk
Some of my research was aided by Oliver Jackson, who lives with CF, and I’d like to thank him for his input.
About the author
Vanessa is the award-winning author of several young adult novels including Zelah Green (Egmont, 2009), which won the Manchester Children’s Book Prize and was shortlisted for the Waterstones Prize 2009, and The Haunting of Tabitha Grey (Egmont, 2012), a contemporary ghost story with a shocking twist.
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