Laura Castoro - Icing On The Cake

www.mirabooks.co.uk

For Drake Anthony, the newest member of the Castoro clan.

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

A big thanks to Scott McGehee, owner of

Boulevard Bread Company in Little Rock, Arkansas.

And a special thanks to his night crew, who let me in

on the secret life of bread making. After watching their

intensive efforts, I’ll never complain about the

cost of a loaf of artisan bread again!

The Pritikin diet almost killed me. Then along came Atkins, followed by the Stillman, Scarsdale, Hollywood, ketogenic and Zone diets. The South Beach was almost my coup de grâce. I’ve fought the good fight with all. I’m a baker.

Bread is the staff of life. Who could resist the warm yeasty fragrance of something loving in the oven? Plenty, to tell by sales at the No-Bagel Emporium during the no-carb years. After years of denying themselves steaks and chops, butter and cheese, the diet nation was ready to indulge in fat, as long as no flour was involved. But the mass hysteria couldn’t last. The craze has fizzled. It’s just a matter of time before bread is king again.

Yet New Jersey is not Manhattan. New ideas, even bad-diet fads, take a while to catch on and twice as long to fade out.

The morning rush, make that amble, has slowed as a well-toned woman in a workout camisole and low-rise pants gazes longingly at my bread racks. Then she sucks in her lower lip. She said she just came in for bottled water but I sense a weakness.

Shameless panderer that I am, I lure undecided customers with generous samples. Yesterday it was palm-size ciabatta slices spread with violet-flower honey. Today it’s raspberry-almond butter spread upon chocolate sourdough.

“We were meant for bread,” I whisper over my countertop like a desperate lover. “Try it.”

She shakes her head, clutching her Nina Bucci workout bag to her chest. “I really shouldn’t.”

“Just a taste.” I push the tray an inch closer to her. “If you’re going to sin, do it for the best of reasons.”

“I suppose one nibble can’t hurt.” She looks quickly left and right in my all-but-empty store, then reaches out and snatches up the smallest cube and pops it in her mouth.

I know what to expect, the sudden widening of her eyes, the slight catch of her breath, and then that little moan of animal satisfaction. I nod and smile. “I’ll just pop a loaf in a bag for you. Pay now and pick it up on the way back from working out.”

Before she can think better of her seduction I turn to bag a loaf, only a little ashamed of myself. I’ve become a pimp, and my madam is un petit pain.

Let me explain. I’m a bread addict. My grandparents owned the Bagel Emporium in Upper Montclair, New Jersey, for fifty years. They bought it from a Jewish couple from Hoboken, who were some of the first to emigrate to the new state of Israel in 1949. Five years ago Grandpa Horace decided they were too old to carry on and left the business to me, their only grandchild, and moved to Phoenix. It was a case of perfect timing. My career in advertising with my now ex, Ted, had begun to bore me to tears. I didn’t have to think twice. I’m a Jersey girl, albeit one with a degree from a Swiss finishing school. Practicality is bred into my genes. The way I see it something that engages the five senses, makes arm-toning exercises an option and produces one of life’s oldest culinary delights is a win-win situation.

Okay, Ted hated the idea. He said that in leaving advertising for an industry requiring physical labor I was “Opting out of an upper-middle-class career for a trade with all the cachet of cosmetology.”

I consider his attitude bias. He has gluten sensitivity, which makes him swell with gas. Not a deadly reaction, just a very uncomfortable one. The sight of a floury kitchen counter is enough to send him reeling backward.

“Thanks.” My customer smiles shyly at me as she pockets her change. “I hope Rodrigo doesn’t smell chocolate bread on my breath.”

“My pleasure.” I offer her a Pez from my Snoopy dispenser. “This will keep it our little secret.”

Ted’s opinion aside, I was born to make bread. I compensate by making the best bread in the tri-state area. I have plaques on the wall that attest to the fact.

We’re an artisan bakery, which is small enough so that each worker knows the whole process of making bread, and two or three of us can make enough batches to supply the daily requirements of the store.

From the beginning, we flourished.

The location was ideal, situated on the first floor of a three-story building whose second floor is home to Five-0, a lifestyle magazine for the woman of a certain age. The third floor houses Rodrigo’s Body Salon, which caters to suburbanites with cellulite issues. Between them and street traffic, the Bagel Emporium had a readymade clientele of boomer women who no longer thought two lettuce leaves make a lunch, and health acolytes who reasoned they had earned a little sumthin’ after burning two cinnamon buns’ worth of calories. Burn two, eat one. It was a calculation they could live with, and I knew I could live on.

Within weeks of ownership, I invested in two used industrial mixers and a brand-new stone deck oven, and branched out from bagels to my personal passion: leaven bread. We make the basics like baguettes, ciabatta, pagnotta, whole wheat, rye and sourdough. But I love to experiment. Custom orders for chocolate-cherry pumpernickel and piñon-nut queso blanco con mango whole wheat garnered so many requests they quickly became store staples along with gourmet delights like bittersweet chocolate croissants, bourbon pecan cinnamon rolls and focaccia pizzas. Friends call my creations the haute couture of bread-making. Business was so good after the first year that I dropped bagels altogether, a decision appreciated by the deli down the block. Regulars nicknamed us the No-Bagel Emporium, and it stuck. Then disaster struck. Noodles, pasta and bread became the pariahs of modern life.

The bakery is definitely on the road to recovery but the bills accrued while it was on life support sucked up all my discretionary savings. The bread is better than ever, but once lost, one’s clientele is difficult to lure back. We’re a broken habit.

I glance around my store. Like me, it’s neat but showing its age. Once I wore Albert Nippon and Ferragamos. Now I dress from the Gap sale rack. The No-Bagel Emporium needs a makeover to attract new attention. But there’s already a lien on the bakery. Guess we’ll both have to make do for now.

I check the front windows for the passing of a perspective customer. The bump bump vibrations of the body-pump class sound track that filters into my shop means my customer base is focused for the moment on burning calories, not consuming them.

To console my disappointment that there is no line around the block waiting to get in there’s always the case for a cinnamon roll. One bite is all it takes to produce a smile. Its syrupy, crunchy texture cannot be bested anywhere in the tri-state area. I know because we won a taste test four years ago.