Frosting Her Christmas Cookies - Alina Jacobs Page 0,5
me then thought better of it.
“You’re just jealous,” she said haughtily. “I’m going to snag that billionaire.”
“I would hope so,” I said, turning my back to her to gather my ingredients. “Otherwise, all that money you spent on boob and butt implants would go to waste.”
“Stop pretending you don’t want him.” She huffed.
“As if I want to chain myself to some Christmas-loving simpleton with more money than brain cells,” I scoffed.
Jonathan was on a date with another contestant when I went back out onto the studio floor. Like the rest of the bachelorettes, she was wearing a skimpy Christmas outfit. This one was a sexy nutcracker, her skirt short enough that everyone could see her matching panties every time she crossed her legs as she perched like a model on the edge of the large wooden baking table.
“I hope you aren’t serving a dessert to anyone with your bodily fluid on it,” I said a bit too loudly as I walked past them. The camera guy stifled a laugh. “You’re going to make people sick.”
“Don’t act like you don’t want a little frosting on your Christmas cookies,” Jonathan said to me.
Fortunately, the producers led him away before I could do something drastic.
My phone went off. I fished it out of the reindeer head.
Belle: Don’t kill my brother please.
Morticia: You have five of them. Surely you won’t miss this one.
I tried to center myself. I could just blow off the contest and make something dumb like a Jell-O mold, but I was competitive—hence my ill-advised attempt to go after the Getty internship.
Tarts were on the dessert menu. I took a deep breath then gritted my teeth against Jonathan’s flirty comments and the other bachelorettes’ giggles.
When I cooked at home in Harrogate, I had dead quiet, just Salem for company, and a soundtrack of Tibetan singing bowls. Here, though, I was surrounded by a torturous cacophony of Christmas carols, high-pitched giggling, and that bubbly fake bonding that women who are clearly going to be at each other’s throats in a few hours do when they first meet each other.
The first step of the tart was the crust. One could use store-bought graham crackers, as Becky, another contestant, was doing while Jonathan watched and made horrible Christmas-themed jokes. Or you could hand-make a crust. Clearly, I chose the more difficult method.
My crust was going to be a flakey gingerbread shortbread recipe. I melted butter on the stove then sifted flour, ginger, cinnamon, allspice, cloves, nutmeg, salt, and baking soda into a bowl. In another bowl, I mixed the butter, a little olive oil (that was my secret! Besides, I’m Italian), and sugar to cream it. Then I added grade A maple syrup and the amaretto and stirred it into a thick mixture. Then I carefully folded in the dry ingredients a cupful at a time. I couldn’t knead the dough because that would destroy the flakey texture. At the end, I had a pungent, spicy, rich, caramel-colored dough.
An arm clad in a fancy bespoke suit reached over my shoulder and took a pinch of the dough. “Yum,” Jonathan said in my ear. “Tastes like Christmas.”
I groped around for the knife.
“Looking for this?” Johnathan teased, waving the knife around.
“That is not a toy,” I snapped at him. “And you better not cut yourself and bleed all over my station.”
“Oh, so she does want to win the contest,” he said.
“And he does want his arm broken or worse,” I retorted, grabbing the next-sharpest thing, a metal spatula, and brandishing it at his crotch region. But Jonathan just chuckled.
“I knew as soon as I offered to frost your Christmas cookies that you were going to be all over me,” he said in his stupid deep voice. He set down the knife carefully then quickly pinched off another piece of dough before gliding away.
“Thirty more hours, then I’m out of here,” I chanted as I wrapped the dough in cling wrap and stuck it in the fridge to chill.
While it cooled, I moved on to the tart filling. A rich chocolate ganache spiked to boozy perfection with amaretto, it would be the perfect counterpoint to the spicy gingerbread crust.
I shaved the rich dark chocolate while the heavy cream warmed in a double broiler on the stove. The kitchen was heating up. I fanned myself. Why had I not insisted I be allowed a change of clothes? I wanted to tear