The door banged again as Rob came in, carrying an empty mop bucket.
Mum disengaged herself hurriedly. ‘It’s alright, Rob love, I’m just being silly – such a lovely wedding . . .’
‘Absolutely. Best one I’ve ever had. Have you and Mike had a falling-out?’ Apparently Rob was going for the sledgehammer approach.
‘No! Why would we?’
‘Glad to hear it. Because it’s blindingly obvious that you’re perfect for each other.’
I stared at him – there are times, just occasionally, when I’m rendered speechless with wonder at the awesomeness of my twin.
Mum faltered backwards, collided with the edge of the sink bench and gripped it with both hands as a drowning man might grip a spar.
‘Perfect,’ Anna repeated firmly, and I blinked at her in turn. I’d have expected a certain amount of disapproval from Anna – not an open denunciation, she’s far too kind, but some degree of hesitation and misgiving.
‘Hear, hear,’ I said, finding my voice.
‘But – but –’
‘But what?’ said Rob.
‘What would people say?’ Mum whispered.
‘What people? Us? We say crack on.’
‘Your father . . .’
‘He’ll be awful,’ Rob admitted. ‘But then he’s awful anyway.’
Mum shivered.
‘Who would you rather upset, Dad or Mike?’ I asked, adding my mite to the interrogation.
She covered her face with her hands. ‘I’m his stepmother,’ she wailed.
‘Ex-stepmother,’ I said. ‘And – and you never actually mothered him.’
‘I’m older than he is,’ she continued, her voice muffled.
‘Five years. That’s nothing.’
‘It’s not nothing! It would mean not having children of his own, and he’d be a w-wonderful father . . .’
‘Isn’t that up to him?’ asked Anna.
‘Stop it!’ said Mum, lifting her head and glaring at us. ‘Stop – steamrolling me!’
Rob smiled at her. ‘We just want you to be happy,’ he said.
‘And Mike,’ I said. ‘You know; two birds, one stone.’
Rob picked up the portable phone and handed it to her. She took it gingerly, as if it might bite. ‘Ring him.’
‘Please, Mum?’ I said.
‘Go on, you know you want to.’
‘Chop chop. No time like the present.’
‘Be quiet!’ she said, laughing through her tears. ‘You’re horrible, all of you. Go away!’
I plucked the phone back out of her hand, dialled Mike’s cell phone number and handed it back.
‘Lia!’ Mum cried. ‘What are you –? Stop it!’
‘Hello,’ came Mike’s voice as he answered it.
Mum gave a little breathless sob, fumbled with the phone and dropped it into the sink among the wineglasses.
There was a brief, nonplussed silence, during which Anna fished it back out and dried it inadequately on a tea towel.
‘Here,’ said Rob, pulling his cell phone out of his back pocket and scrolling through the menu. ‘There’s his number – just press “talk” when you’re ready.’
‘And maybe step away from the sink,’ I said.
On which note we withdrew. When I looked back through the kitchen window, Mum had the phone to her ear.
Epilogue
Mum and Mike did eventually get their act together. He moved first into the spare room at the café and then, in a diffident, furtive sort of way, into Mum’s house. He drives trucks for Glen Jackson, shears sheep for lifestyle-blockers, moves rocks for Rob and is an excellent barista if Anna and I can get our hands on him. He and Mum are very, very happy.
Dad isn’t speaking to any family members except Gina. We’re bearing up quite well.
Hugh recently met a nice lady online; she lives north of Whangarei and makes goat’s cheese.
Anna and I have a full-time staff member, a pale, slender youth called Dwayne who eats like a whole pack of ravening wolves and makes absolutely stellar toasted sandwiches. We get two days off a week each, now. It’s lovely.
Isaac is currently in prison, although he comes up for parole in another few months. I try not to worry about that, and mostly I succeed.
Tracey is doing a media arts degree in Auckland, in a haphazard, two-steps-forwards-one-step-back sort of way. She’s taking her lithium and she has Craig every second weekend, although she’s quite prone to cancelling at four thirty on Friday afternoons. She dislikes me intensely. I wish she didn’t, and I really wish she wouldn’t tell Craig that, if it wasn’t for me, Mummy and Daddy would be living happily together in the same house, but life is seldom completely perfect.
It’s pretty close, though.
Pretty Delicious Recipes
Strawberry Ice-cream Cake
Looks almost unbearably classy, tastes wonderful and lasts weeks in the freezer. (NB: This last claim has never been personally tested, owing to deliciousness of ice-cream cake and lack of willpower.)
Heat the oven to 170°C. In a bowl, mix together:
1 cup of plain flour
¼ cup of brown sugar
100 grams of butter, melted
½ cup of hazelnuts, reasonably finely chopped
Spread the nut mixture out evenly in a shallow baking dish and bake for 10–15 minutes until lightly toasted, stirring every couple of minutes.
While the nut mixture is toasting, combine in a bowl:
2 cups of chopped strawberries
2 egg whites
1 cup of sugar
2 teaspoons of lemon juice
Beat hard for 10 minutes with an electric beater, until light and fluffy. (Don’t forget to keep stirring the nut mixture, which will be only too ready to burn to a cinder if given half a chance.)
Whip:
250 millilitres of cream
Fold the whipped cream into the fluffy strawberry mixture.
Line a round cake tin with baking paper and then spread two-thirds of the toasted nut mixture across the bottom. Spoon in the strawberry cream fluff, and sprinkle the rest of the nut mixture over the top. Freeze for at least a few hours, remove from the cake tin and serve in wedges.
Chocolate Brownie
This is a brilliant recipe – it always works, tastes great, keeps beautifully, freezes well, takes four minutes to assemble and twenty minutes to cook. (The amounts below make quite a small brownie; for thicker and more serious portions – more like a mud cake and less like a slice – double the recipe and bake it in a cake tin.)
Heat the oven to 160°C. In a medium-sized saucepan, melt together:
150 grams of butter
6 tablespoons of cocoa
Remove the saucepan from the heat and stir in:
1 cup of white sugar
2 eggs (or, if you’re short of eggs, 1 egg and 1 egg-sized dollop of natural yoghurt – results identical)*
a pinch of salt
¾ cup of plain flour
½ cup of chocolate chips or chocolate buttons
1 teaspoon of vanilla essence
Line a sponge roll tin with baking paper. Spread the mixture in the tin and bake for 20 minutes, until just set.
To serve the brownie as a dessert, warm each portion slightly in the microwave and top with whatever combination of whipped cream/ice cream/icing sugar/berry sauce you please.
* Be sure to stir the eggs into the hot mixture right away; if you leave them sitting on top and wander off to do something else, the whites start to cook.
Boysenberry Cheesecake
This isn’t actual cooking; it’s just assembly. Extremely delicious.
In a small bowl, mix together:
1 packet of crushed biscuits (e.g. arrowroots, gingernuts, chocolate chip biscuits if you’re feeling decadent . . . )
100 grams of butter, melted
Line a round cake tin with baking paper, cover the bottom with the crumb mixture, press it down and sling the tin into the freezer to set w
hile you go on with the filling.
For the filling, mix together:
1 tin (395 grams) of sweetened condensed milk
250 grams of cream cheese
1 packet of boysenberry jelly crystals dissolved in ⅔ cup of boiling water
Once the mixture is smooth and pink and beautiful, fold in:
300 millilitres of cream, whipped
Retrieve the base from the freezer and pour the filling over the top. Return to the fridge for a couple of hours to set.
For extra impressiveness, mix in a small saucepan:
1 tin (425 grams, or thereabouts) of boysenberries
2 tablespoons of cornflour mixed to a paste with a little water
1 tablespoon of icing sugar
Bring to the boil on the stovetop and cook, stirring, for a few minutes until the mixture thickens to a custard-ish consistency. Cool to room temperature before spreading on top of the cheesecake.
NB: You can make endless variations of this cheesecake: different flavours of jelly – or ½ cup of lemon juice and 3 teaspoons of gelatine dissolved in a little boiling water instead of shop-bought jelly crystals (this is particularly good, if you have enough lemons); different sorts of biscuits for the base; chopped-up chocolate bars or broken biscuits stirred through the filling; chocolate shavings and fresh berries piled artistically on top . . .
Bread Dough
(which can be turned into a wide variety of seriously good things to eat)
Learn to make bread. Honestly. Not only is it about a hundred times better than the bought stuff, but people are impressed out of all proportion to the amount of effort required.
In a large bowl, mix together:
2 cups of warm water (warmer than tepid, cooler than a hot cup of tea)
1 tablespoon of sugar
1 tablespoon of yeast
Leave for 10 minutes or so, until it froths up, and then add:
4½–5 cups of plain flour
1 teaspoon of salt
a slop of oil
Knead to a smooth dough. (A breadmaker or a mixer with a dough hook makes this really easy, but if you don’t have either, mix the ingredients in the bowl until they stick together, tip the dough out onto a clean bench top dusted with flour and knead for a few minutes by hand.) Leave the dough to rise somewhere warm for about half an hour, then turn into one of the following:
Cottage loaf Put a greased casserole dish in the oven and then heat the oven to 200°C. Whip out the hot casserole dish, sling in the ball of dough, make a couple of artistic-looking slashes across the top, dust lightly with flour and bake for 40 minutes. Comes out with a lovely chewy crust.
Foccacia Roll the dough out to cover a greased baking tray, sprinkle with your choice of oil/crushed garlic/chopped rosemary leaves/grated parmesan/caramelised onion and cream cheese/sea salt/anything else you fancy and bake at 180°C for 30 minutes.
Pizza base Heat the oven to 200°C. Divide dough into 4 and roll each portion out thinly, to cover a greased oven tray. Cover – not too thickly; less is more with pizza toppings – with toppings of your choice and bake for 10 minutes.
Calzone Merely a fancy term for a pizza that you fold in half like an apple turnover before baking. Bake as for pizza.
Dinner rolls Divide dough into 12 portions and roll each into a ball. Place them on a greased baking dish, not quite touching, brush them with beaten egg for a high-gloss veneer and bake at 190°C for 30 minutes.
Bread sticks Divide dough into 12 portions and roll each into a long skinny tube. Brush each one with oil and roll in grated cheese for extra delectability. Arrange them 5 centimetres apart on 2 greased oven trays and bake at 190°C for 20–30 minutes.
Pita pockets Divide dough into 8 portions. Roll each portion out into a thin circle and dust with flour. Heat your oven as high as you possibly can and bake 2 pockets at a time for 3 minutes on an oven tray lined with baking paper, then flip them over and bake for another 3 minutes. They puff up beautifully.
Bagels Divide dough into 8 portions. Shape each one into a ring and leave to rise for half an hour or so. Toss 4 at a time into a pot of boiling water for 3 minutes, then fish them out, line them up on 2 greased baking trays, brush them with beaten egg and bake at 180°C for another 25 minutes. Dense and chewy and delicious.
Camping cheesy buns Take a small lump of dough, flatten it slightly, fold it around a smaller lump of cheese and cook it for 5 minutes a side on the hot plate of a barbecue. Very popular with children, and, for some reason, tastes 40 times better than it would if baked in the oven.
Cinnamon Buns
Very, very delicious. And they look awesome.
In a large bowl, mix:
1 cup of very hot water
1 cup of milk
100 grams of butter, roughly diced
⅓ cup of sugar
1 egg
1 heaped tablespoon of yeast
Leave for 10 minutes or so, until the yeast froths up, and then add:
5–6 cups of white flour
2 teaspoons of salt
Knead well to make a soft dough. (If you don’t have a breadmaker or a mixing machine with a dough hook to do the kneading for you, mix the ingredients until they stick together, tip the dough out of the bowl onto a flat surface dusted with flour and knead it by hand for a few minutes.) Leave the dough in a warm spot for about half an hour to rise a little.
While the dough does its thing, line a large round cake tin with non-stick baking paper.
In a small saucepan or microwave-proof bowl, melt together:
50 grams of butter
½ cup of brown sugar
2 teaspoons of cinnamon
Dust the bench top lightly with flour, and roll or press out the dough into a rough rectangle, about 40 centimetres long, 30 centimetres wide and 1 centimetre thick. Spread the melted cinnamon-sugar mixture evenly over the top (not quite to the edges; it will make a break for freedom) and roll up the dough rectangle from the longer side, as if you were rolling up a magazine.
Cut your Swiss roll–shaped tube of dough into 3-centimetre sections and pack them, cut side up and about 1 centimetre apart, in the paper-lined cake tin. Scrape up any little puddles of escaped cinnamon-sugar mixture and dribble over the top of the buns.
Leave the cake tin somewhere warm for half an hour or so to allow the buns to rise a little, and then fan bake at 170°C for 30–40 minutes, until golden brown. (If you’re in a hurry, you can skip this rising step – instead put the buns into a cold oven and then turn it on. They’ll rise pretty well as the oven heats up.) The buns will double in size and join at the edges as they cook.
While they’re baking, make a glaze by mixing:
1 tablespoon of icing sugar
juice of 1 lemon
As soon as the buns come out of the oven, brush them with the glaze.
Best pulled apart and eaten warm, but still very good the next day.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks so much to everyone at Paper Plus in Te Awamutu – especially Sharon and Rebecca, who are absolutely top ladies.
And thank you to Jarrod, who doesn’t read things I write but is still quite mint.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DANIELLE HAWKINS lives on a sheep and beef farm near Otorohanga in New Zealand with her husband and two children. She works part-time as a large animal vet, and writes when the kids are at school and she’s not required for farming purposes. She is a keen gardener, an intermittently keen cook and an avid reader. Her other talents include memorising poetry, making bread and zapping flies with an electric fly swat. She tends to exaggerate to improve the story, with the result that her husband believes almost nothing she says. The Pretty Delicious Café is Danielle’s third novel.
PRAISE FOR DANIELLE HAWKINS
Dinner at Rose’s
‘It’s so good that it’s hard to believe it’s a first novel. It had better not be her last. Please, Danielle’ – Lee Matthews, Manawatu Standard
‘What really carries it is
the quality of the writing. The dialogue is absolutely spot on. You would almost believe the author wrote for TV or writes sitcoms. It’s very, very funny’ – Paper Plus, Winter Reads
‘A cross between All Creatures Great and Small, Bridget Jones’s Diary and something the Topp Twins would write if there was only one of them and she was straight, this is a very funny book’ – Next Book Club
‘It was page 4 when I saw this and knew it was going to be a good book: “You really should consider becoming an eccentric yourself. It makes life so much more interesting”’ – Jessica, GoodReads
‘This book grabbed me straight away, from the moment I opened the first page right up until the second I closed the book after finishing’ – Megan Readinginthesunshine, GoodReads
‘I LOVED this book and devoured it quickly’ – Georgia, GoodReads
‘This book . . . has to be the most satisfying in this genre that I’ve ever read’ – Kathleen Dixon, GoodReads
‘A beautifully written, funny, intelligent and heartwarming novel’ – Lisa, GoodReads
‘Absolutely loved it’ – Jessica Cutting, GoodReads
‘. . . am diving straight into the author’s next book!’ – Sallyann Van Leeuwen, GoodReads
Chocolate Cake for Breakfast
‘Another sweet, gently funny depiction of life in the back blocks of New Zealand’ – Next Book Club
‘This is a delightful, contemporary romance’ – Herald Sun
‘Helen is frankly delightful – intelligent but oh-so-human . . . a plausible, relatable storyline and hugely appealing characters. A charming summer read, and a giggling good time’ – Australian Women’s Weekly
‘This was an amusing read that felt much shorter than it was because I just couldn’t put it down’ – Wyrdness, GoodReads
‘I really, really enjoyed this one! The world-building and character-building were really exceptional’ – Molly, GoodReads
‘The only problem I could see in the book was the Wallabies did not win often enough’ – Jodie, GoodReads
The Pretty Delicious Cafe Page 28