The Baking Life of Amelie Day (2 page)

To make 16 of these nice, orangey little muffins you will need:

250g (9 oz) of unsalted butter
250g (9 oz) of golden caster sugar
4 large eggs
140g (5oz) of polenta (this is a maize flour that you can find in the supermarket in the rice/pasta/foreign foods aisles)
200g (7oz) of plain flour
2 teaspoons of baking powder
The zest and juice of two large oranges (you need to hold back 100ml (½ a cup) for the glaze)

For the glaze:

100ml (½ a cup) orange juice
100g (3 ½ oz) golden caster sugar

So you need to heat the oven up first before you put anything in it. Heat it to 160°C/320°F/gas mark 3 (140°C/280°F/gas mark 1 if you are using a fan oven). If the butter is hard as a block of ice, put it in the oven in a bowl for a few minutes to soften it up, because there’s nothing worse than trying to mix hard butter with sugar – it will make you grumpy and cross.

You’ll also need a muffin tin (or possibly two if you only have 12 holes in each) and some muffin baking cases. You can get all this stuff in the supermarket. Put a cake case in each of the holes in the tins and set this all aside.

When your butter is melted, cream it together with the 250g of golden caster sugar. When I say ‘cream’ I mean beat together with a wooden spoon, if you happen to have one. When it’s all light and fluffy then add in one large egg at a time, beating hard in between.

Once that’s all done, mix in all the dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, polenta) and add in the zest (which is the outside of the peel – you can ‘zest’ with a special gadget which your mum or dad probably has in their kitchen, or with a grater) and the juice of the two large oranges (you can either squeeze them to death or use a special juicing gadget, which, again, you might have in a kitchen drawer somewhere). Remember to keep back 100ml of the juice for your glaze later.

OK, so by now you probably have one of the most gloopiest and delicious cake mixes on the planet – it should be pale orange and tasty. Time to dollop it into the muffin cases using a spoon – fill them nearly to the top but not quite. Then put them into the middle shelf of your hot oven and set the timer for about 25 minutes, or until they’re all nice and golden on top and risen.

While they’re baking you could make the orange syrup, which is really easy. Just boil up 100ml of your orange juice with 100g of golden caster sugar and then let it simmer (on a lower heat) for only five minutes. When you’ve taken your cakes out of the oven and removed the paper cases, stick a spoon in the syrup and dribble a load of it over the top of the cakes.

Allow them to cool down and then serve them with a luscious dollop of crème fraiche or natural yoghurt, or you could even try adding some ice cream. They taste even better the next day. Don’t ask me why, but they do.

Chapter Two

I can’t believe it.

‘I’m through!’ I yell, over and over. Mum throws her arms around me and we do an excited victory dance around the lounge, until we’re both out of breath and have to sit back down.

‘Let me look at it again,’ says Mum. She re-reads the letter for about the millionth time. ‘I’m so proud of you, Amelie. You did it!’

I lean my head back against the sofa. I feel as if I’ve been punched in the chest and head. It’s the relief, after all the months of waiting to get the letter after I sent in my application.

‘You should frame that,’ says Mum. She sits down next to me and we both gaze at the logo on the top of the letter.

Britain’s Best Teen Baker of the Year Competition.

I’ve made it through to the quarter-finals.

That means I’m in with a real chance of World Cake Domination.

‘Hooray,’ I say in a tired voice. Then I flop down and text Gemma the good news.

Mum kisses the top of my head.

The letter says I have to travel up to London for the quarter-finals. There’s going to be a big competition, based in a trendy glass-fronted building designed especially for it and the whole thing is going to be filmed for a few television programmes too.

I’ll be taking part in a bake-off against twelve other teenagers and the three winners will end up in the semi-finals. After that one person will be eliminated and only two will be left in the Grand Final to fight it out for the title of Britain’s Best Teen Baker of the Year.

I’ve got to come up with my own recipes for the quarter-finals and it has to be a mixture of cakes and biscuits too, just to show that I’m not a one-cake pony. I’ve got to do two baked desserts and one selection of biscuits.

I’m a bit worried about the biscuits. I mean – I DO know how to make biscuits and they always taste good, but I need something really unusual for the competition and, to be honest, I’m more at home with making cakes. There’s something about swirling a spoonful of gloopy white icing across the top of a fragrant little chocolate cake that hits about 100 on my cakeometer.

‘I need books,’ I say to Mum. ‘Pronto. I mean – I need them like yesterday. Could I have some money?’

‘What about your shop job?’ says Mum. ‘Or have they stopped paying you?’

I sigh. I’ve told Mum about a million times that I don’t get paid in actual cash. Just at this moment I rather wish that I did. Then I could rush into town and fill my arms with as many baking books as I could get my hands on.

‘I’m skint,’ I say. ‘I need money. Please, Mum? Could I have an advance on my pocket money? It’s really important.’

Mum sighs and reaches for her handbag. My heart lifts up, all hopeful.

Then she zips it shut again. My heart plummets back down into my boots.

‘I’ve got a better idea,’ she says. ‘And a cheaper one. Why don’t you get onto one of your social networking sites and make an appeal for recipes?’

I roll my eyes and cross my arms. Underneath, my brain starts to compute in a wild and furious way quite at odds with how my knackered body is feeling.

I don’t want to give Mum the satisfaction of knowing that her idea is actually really awesome, so I skulk off to my bedroom and then I dash to my laptop and log on.

I go onto Facebook and I write to all my friends on there, asking if they could send me any recipes for savoury stuff. Then I rewrite my request because I realise that most of my friends aren’t quite as obsessed with baking as I am, so I ask them to ask their parents for recipes too. Then I set myself up a blog where I can update people with all the news from the competition and after loads of thought I write my first blog entry and post it live. This is what it says:

If you’ve found this website it might be because you’ve Googled the work ‘cake’ or the word ‘bake’, or maybe you’re just nosing around on the internet and have found me by accident. Anyway, welcome to the first blog posting of Amelie Day, wannabee Champion Baker and future author of
The Amelie Day Book of Baking
. I’ve been chosen as a quarter-finalist in
Britain’s Best Teen Baker
and I’ll be appearing on a television screen near you in the not-too-distant future. I live with my Mum but not my Dad. They split up when I was two but they’re still friends, or so they say. Mum is a big fan of my baking, for various reasons which I’m not going to list here ‘cos they’re boring and my whole life is too full of them anyway. But all you need to know is that I bake. I love baking. It’s my life. Flour Power! Oh, and I need your recipes, especially if you know how to make any really awesome and unusual biscuits. So if you’ve got any you don’t mind sharing with me, please post them here.

I stand back and read my first blog posting. Then I read it again with my mouth full of chocolate. I keep emergency rations in my schoolbag and in my desk drawer at home. Most kids are told not to stuff themselves with junk all the time, but I’m not most kids and my mum doesn’t mind.

Besides, my chocolate is really good quality. I don’t buy so much of the rubbish sugary milky stuff that other kids are addicted to, although from time to time it’s the only thing that will do when I’m desperate for a quick pick-me-up sugar/calorie fest.

I watched a programme about how real, decent chocolate comes from the best quality cacao beans and I persuaded Karim to order a few bars of the dark stuff for his shop, knowing full well that the other customers wouldn’t go near it. He ended up with the bars leftover unsold, so guess what? He passed them straight to me as part of my ‘wages’.

I’ve got some left in my emergency stash drawer. I slide it out of the pale silver wrapper and enjoy the snapping sound that it makes when I break it. I read in a cookbook once that this is a sign of really good chocolate. Then I sniff the rich smell of the beans. It’s a sharp smell, a bit like lemons. I put one precious square onto my tongue and allow it to melt without sucking. It zings into my mouth and seems to wake up my brain. I sit back in my chair with a big sigh and enjoy the sensation. When it’s gone, I don’t replace it. Sometimes a little bit is loads more delicious than a lot.

I only learned that quite recently. It kind of goes against everything that Mum is telling me to do all the time, but I reckon that the odd day where I don’t over-eat is probably not going to do me much more harm than has already been done.

I log off from my computer and go downstairs to see what Mum is making for dinner.

***

‘You’ll need some new clothes,’ Mum says.

We’re eating Shepherd’s Pie together at the kitchen table with the doors thrown open onto the courtyard outside. Our house used to be part of an old stable for a grand estate. The grand house has long since gone, but the stable buildings were converted into houses years ago and we live on the very end of the block. Next to our house is a huge arch where the horses and carriages used to pass through into the back of the grand estate, but nowadays cars drive through it to park outside their houses instead. If you look closely up at the arch you can still see hinges where the grand gates once were and our house is full of beams with old nails hammered through them for holding horse tack and harnesses. It’s what Mum calls a ‘character property’ when she’s describing it to people she doesn’t know. It’s damp in winter, has low ceilings and tons of leaks, but the brilliant thing is that it’s got an enormous kitchen made up of three rooms knocked through into one. There’s a cooking station in the middle with stools around the outside where we eat meals, do homework or in my case, bake myself into oblivion.

Mum got the house when she and Dad got divorced. Dad came from a rich family, so he was generous when they split up and even came round house-hunting with her until she laid eyes upon the run-down stable conversion where we now live. He paid her extra to have it done up and we’ve been here for eleven years.

I love our house, but most of all I love the kitchen.

That’s where my heart belongs.

That’s where I truly feel at home.

‘I don’t need any more clothes, Mum,’ I say.

My mind isn’t on clothes tonight. Or any night, come to think of it.

I just logged onto my blog and already there are two recipes on there from complete strangers who’ve found it. One of them, from a girl called Jane, is for chocolate chip and peanut cookies. My eyes light up and I print off her recipe and I’m trying to read it downstairs, but Mum keeps interrupting me.

‘Yes, but don’t you want to look nice on the television?’ asks Mum. She glances at my purple leggings and white t-shirt with a giant picture of a purple cupcake in the middle of it. ‘You look lovely when you make the effort, Amelie.’

She comes over to where I’m sitting, forking up carrots and mince, and pulls my hair back onto the damp nape of my neck.

‘I wish you’d wear your hair up instead of in this bird’s nest,’ she says, releasing it back into its usual scruffy position. ‘You have a fabulous profile. Like a French actress or something.’

I bat her away with my hands. ‘Mum,’ I say. ‘I’m so not in the mood. It’s more important that I actually know what I’m going to cook for this competition, isn’t it?’

Mum sighs and loads empty plates into the dishwasher.

‘Well, I’m going to take you shopping at the weekend,’ she says. ‘No argument. I got paid a little bonus last week and I think we both deserve a treat.’

‘OK, OK,’ I say. ‘Whatever. And now I need to go and experiment with golden syrup, if that’s alright with you?’

Mum turns round with a plate in her hand.

‘Amelie,’ she says. ‘We need to talk about how we’re actually going to manage this trip to London. I mean – it’s going to be tough on you.’

It’s on the tip of my tongue to be rude, because I hate it when she makes a fuss. I guess I know that it all comes from years of caring and worrying about me, so I bite my tongue and go over to the kitchen cupboard where I’ve labelled the door ‘AMELIE’S STUFF’.

I stare at all the lovely rows of tins and jars and bottles and packets, but my eyes appear to have misted over or got tired or something, because for a moment I can’t see.

Then the mist clears.