The Ingredients of You and Me (Hopeless Romantics #3) - Nina Bocci Page 0,1

keeping them all on staff was a part of the contract with the new owners that I wouldn’t budge on. They couldn’t replace them because of their lack of pastry schooling. But my staff had drive, discipline, and a willingness to start from the ground up and learn. It was risky, but thank goodness it was worth it.

I knew they would appreciate that when I finally gave them the news.

I wondered what about the current structure would remain and who, if anyone, would go. Over the next few weeks, this space, my once hole-in-the-wall boutique bakery that I started as a terrified twenty-five-year-old, would be transformed without me at its helm.

But before I ventured off into the sunset, I had to let my people know. Each one was looking up at me expectantly. All it did was make me that much more nervous. Not nervous about the choice I made—I was proud of the decision to sell—but I was nervous about how they’d take it. At the end of the day, these people were, in essence, my family.

Rolling my shoulders back, I took a deep breath and remembered why I’d sold a piece of my heart in the first place. It was time I put myself first, and the bakery would be better off for it.

“I want to thank you all for coming on a Friday afternoon, especially on such short notice. I know it’s the last day of our week-long vacation, but I have an announcement to make and I can’t wait until Monday,” I began, standing at the corner of the table, keeping my hands folded together.

“We know,” someone said, their voice interrupting my thought.

“What?” I said, looking up. They were all smiling and nodding. “You know… what?”

“Well, we have an idea,” someone else said.

“It’s about the Food Network again, right?” my lead baker said, getting up from the table and coming over to stand beside me. “We’re excited for you to compete again. We saw the casting information sheet on the bulletin board in your office.”

“Oh,” I mumbled.

I squeezed her hand. “Okay, yes, I was asked to come back to the Kitchen Sink baking competition, but I declined.” Kitchen Sink was about bakers who created masterpieces with totally random items, and I’d been on it a couple of times already.

The nervous rumblings started, “Why?” being the most repeated question.

“Declining was easy. They didn’t ask me to be a baker this time. The only way they wanted me was if I came on to judge. Perhaps if they wanted me to compete again like the last few times, I would have considered.”

A few years back when we weren’t sure if D&V would make it, I applied for a show on a dare by my best friend, Charlotte. I entered the Food Network’s Next Best Baker competition after a lot of back-and-forth about it being the wrong time. It was risky to try out, considering D&V was failing at the time, but the prospect of being on national television and getting the business exposure won out. Of course, I never thought in a million years that with all the applicants, they’d choose me. But they did, and it had the exact effect I had hoped for D&V: a windfall of business from around the country. Visitors now trekked to my little corner of Brooklyn to snag a cupcake, and a photo.

It also gave me a bit of an ego boost. Over the last few years, I went on various types of baking shows on the network, not just because I loved competing but because my business flourished thanks to the appearances and to my frequent wins. Funnily enough, many of the shows were sponsored by The Confectionary, the company that I’d just sold my bakery to.

“Well, that’s flattering, right?” someone said from the end of the table. “You being a judge is considered a step up, isn’t it?”

I laughed, picking at the smudge of melted chocolate chip that was crusted to my knuckles from the cookies I had made earlier that day. I supposed that it was a step up, but it didn’t feel that way.

“So, you are going to do it? Be a judge on the next show?”

I shook my head. “After a lot of reflection, I turned them down. It feels a bit like the passing of the torch, if that makes sense. I’ve been on more than a dozen times. Even I’m sick of seeing myself on television. It’s about time I give someone else a