Baking Lessons

by Katie Allen

  That caught his attention. “Anything?”

  “Anything. I’m closed on Sundays, so I will dedicate the morning to baking whatever your heart—and stomach—desires.”

  “Cream-filled cupcakes.” The words rushed out of him, as if he was afraid she’d take back the offer if he didn’t accept quickly enough. “Extra filling and extra frosting.”

  “Done. What flavor?”

  Somehow, he managed to look both appalled at himself and delighted at the same time. “Vanilla. Some with chocolate frosting and some with vanilla. No sprinkles, but they can have that glittery sugar on top.”

  “It’s a deal. Aprons and hairnets are over there in the dry pantry.” She pointed.

  Taking a step in that direction, Hamilton paused. “Hairnet?”

  His hair was short enough that he probably didn’t need it, but Leah didn’t tell him that. He could’ve also just worn a hat, but she didn’t mention that, either. For some reason, she was taking a great and secret delight in the idea of Mr. Anthony Fitzgerald Hamilton III wearing a hairnet. To his credit, he just made a very small face before heading toward the aprons—and hairnets.

  Without Leah even mentioning it, he washed his hands for an extra-long time, using the nail brush vigorously. She considered making a joke that they weren’t performing surgery, but she figured it was probably best not to mock her newly bribed employee—at least not until the cookies were decorated.

  The timer beeped, reminding her that the caramel rolls were ready. She pulled out the pans, calling “Hot!” with each one.

  “You don’t have to do that for me,” Hamilton said, watching her from a safe distance several feet away. “I’m capable of using logic and figuring out that something that’s been in an oven is probably hot.”

  Leah laughed. “It’s just habit. When I did my internship at Pan Perfect—that bakery downtown?—there were so many people working in the kitchen that you had to warn the others. A couple of times when people forgot, someone almost got smacked across the face with a hot pan.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Exactly. It made me paranoid. I even announce it when I’m alone.” She turned on her digital thermometer and poked it into the center of the caramel rolls. “Here. You can start earning your cupcakes. This should get up to at least one-eighty. If it doesn’t, pop the pan back in the oven for another few minutes.”

  As Hamilton took over checking the temperature on the caramel rolls, Leah weighed out the now-softened butter and dumped it into the mixer with the sugar. As she turned it on, she pretended to be concentrating on combining the cookie ingredients, but she couldn’t stop sneaking glances at her landlord turned baking assistant. He looked so serious as he checked the thermometer and then inserted it into the next pan with extreme precision. There was something about Hamilton that was strangely fascinating.

  “You doing okay? Oh.” Q charged into the back, stopping abruptly when he saw Hamilton. “Mr. Hamilton’s here. Good. You’ll be fine, then.” Without even waiting for Leah to confirm if she would be fine—or not—Q pushed through the swinging door, disappearing into the front area once more.

  “Everything’s great,” she said fake-cheerily. “Thank you for asking and staying around for an answer.”

  There was no response from the front, but Hamilton was smiling just a tiny bit in that newly discovered endearing way of his. “These are all the appropriate temperature.”

  “Perfect. We’ll let them cool for fifteen minutes or so before flipping them.”

  “Flipping them?”

  “You’re looking at the bottoms right now.” Leah turned off the mixer and detached the flat beater, scraping the cookie dough off of the blade with her fingers. “Here. Did you want to clean off the beater?”

  He accepted it gingerly. “Wash it, you mean?”

  “No. You can just leave the dirty dishes, and I’ll do them this afternoon.” Wrapping up the dough, she stuck it into the freezer. Normally, she would’ve refrigerated it, but they were in a time crunch. “I meant that you can clean it off. Licking it. With...uh, your tongue. Or using your fingers... Eating it. Oh, for God’s sake, you get my point.” Something so innocent shouldn’t have sounded so dirty. Just saying the word tongue to Hamilton made her flush, not to mention licking or fingers or eating. Obviously, she needed to get out more. Something was wrong with her that she was getting all lusty for her uptight landlord.

  “What about the risk of salmonella?” He hadn’t touched the dough, but he was still holding the beater, eyeing it like it might bite off his tongue if he touched it. “There are quite a few raw eggs in that.”

  “Up to you.” She cleaned off her butcher-block table. “I always think the taste of raw cookie dough is worth the risk, although I’ll probably change my mind about that if I ever actually get salmonella.”

  There it was again. His longing look was back, the I-want-to-but-I-shouldn’t gaze. Leah could almost hear his angel and devil arguing from their perches on his shoulders. When he brought the beater over to the dirty dish tub and laid it inside without touching the dough—with neither his tongue nor his fingers—Leah was a little disappointed. His angel—rather a priggish creature—had won that time. Leah was determined to give the devil a win at the next opportunity.

  “We have nine minutes before the pans need to be flipped,” Hamilton said, washing his hands. He seemed to be scrubbing extra hard, as if to clean his earlier temptation right off of him. “What are we doing now?”

  “Prepping for rolling out the dough.” She tossed flour on the table and then swept it with her hand, spreading it so that it dusted the surface fairly evenly. “It will probably be quickest if we each roll out a section, rather than both of us trying to work on the same area. Are you up for that?” Glancing at him, she tried to judge how freaked out he was at being conscripted into her baking army and forced to make cookies for cupcake payment. It was hard to read him, but she was fairly certain that he was taking the whole thing in stride. She supposed that, after being in the army, baking cookies wouldn’t register very high on the freak-out scale.

  “Yes.” He was watching her movements intently. Taking his own handful of flour, he sprinkled it with enormous care. Leah bustled around, gathering rolling pins and cookie cutters. When she returned to the table, she blinked at Hamilton’s half. The flour was so perfectly distributed that his side of the table looked like a wallpaper pattern.

  “That’s very...neat.”

  Hamilton looked immensely satisfied by the compliment. “Thank you. Four and a half minutes until the caramel rolls need to be flipped.”

  “Um...thank you.” She didn’t bother to say that the fifteen-minute cooling period was just an estimation. Leah had a feeling that estimation was a dirty word to Hamilton. “Why don’t you grab four full sheet pans to put the caramel rolls on?”

  Leah pointed him toward the stack just as the timer beeped again.

  “What does that indicate?” he asked, pulling four pans off of the stack.

  “Pull-aparts need to be rotated.” She pulled on her oven gloves and turned the loaf pans in the oven one hundred and eighty degrees. “I use the scraps from the caramel rolls to make cinnamon pull-aparts.”

  He watched as she closed the oven doors and then yanked off her gloves. “Efficient.”

  “Sweet dough is expensive. Lots of butter and milk and honey and eggs and cinnamon.” She grinned at him. “All the good stuff.”

  Although he didn’t smile back, Leah had a feeling that he was tempted to. “Fifteen minutes is up.”

  “Let’s flip these, then.” She turned the caramel rolls onto the sheet pan, thumping the bottom of the metal pan with a spatula until it echoed, indicating that the caramel rolls had released their hold. Lifting off the now-empty caramel roll pan, she scraped the excess caramel and pecans clinging to the bottom onto the sticky buns. When she glanced up, Hami
lton was frowning.

  “What?”

  “They’re crooked.”

  Glancing down, Leah saw that the rolls had landed on the sheet pan at a slight angle. “That’s okay. Q will cut them apart and put them into individual containers. No one will see them on this sheet.”

  “We’ll see them.”

  “Well, sure.” She tried to think of a kind way to explain that no one else would care. “It’s just a short-term landing spot for the rolls, though. Whether they line up with the edges of the sheet pan doesn’t really matter.”

  His frown deepened. “May I try flipping one?”

  “Sure. Flip away.” Taking the sheet of crookedly de-panned buns, Leah realized that she was scowling at the poor, defenseless rolls, and she made herself stop. It was not the caramel rolls’ fault, and it didn’t, as she’d tried to explain to Hamilton, matter. Now, though, after he’d pointed it out, the slightly off-centered-ness of the rolls was all she could see. Forcing herself to ignore it, she slid the sheet pan on a speed rack and turned her back. It still bugged her, but she refused to pull it back out and try to fix it.

  “There. That’s better.”

  At Hamilton’s satisfied pronouncement, Leah peered around him to see a perfectly aligned rectangle of caramel rolls sitting on the sheet pan.

  “Did you use a ruler?” she asked suspiciously.

  “Of course not.”

  “A T-square?”

  “No.”

  “A level?”

  “No, but that’s not a bad idea.”

  “Yes, that is a bad idea. Move over.” She elbowed him to the side. “It’s my turn.”

  She could tell he didn’t want to give over flipping control, but he moved aside, grudgingly. “Make sure to line it up in both directions.”

  “No backseat flipping allowed.”

  “I’m not backseat flipping.” He paused. “I’m giving you helpful suggestions.”

  “Not really helpful.” As she flipped the pan with more care than she’d ever taken before, Leah tried to remember why she’d thought it was a good idea to recruit her landlord to help her bake. Seven dozen extra cookies to mix, shape, bake, and decorate. Right. “What is your day job, anyway? Besides this slumlord thing you do, I mean.”

  “I’m an actuary. Slumlord?”

  He sounded so offended that she had to look down at the pan she was thumping to hide her smile. The sound changed, echoing hollowly, and she carefully lifted the pan off of the caramel rolls. To her admittedly biased eyes, it looked perfect. “Kidding. You are a very responsible, diligent and conscientious landlord. It’s too bad you’re not as good at flipping caramel rolls as I am, though.”

  The sound he made was hilarious—a sort of wounded quack—and Leah couldn’t hold her straight face anymore. She dissolved into giggles as he leaned closer, trying to get a more centered view of the newly turned rolls.

  “The left side is higher than the right.”

  “It is not.” Her shoulder bumped his as she moved over, examining the rolls critically. “Your eyeballs are what’s crooked if you think that. These are perfectly aligned, down to the millimeter.”

  “Hmm.”

  Leah had been expecting a better comeback than his distracted hmm, and she glanced up at him. He was staring down at her, his eyelids slightly lowered, with the exact same expression as the one he wore when looking at cream-filled cupcakes—the ones with extra frosting. His angelic and demonic shoulder advisors were definitely in a serious battle, and, judging by the focus of his gaze, they were arguing about her.

  “What’s the holdup?”

  At Q’s question, Leah and Hamilton turned toward the door, stepping away from each other in a movement so synchronized it was like they’d rehearsed it.

  “Um...” To her horror, Leah felt heat creeping up her neck toward her face. Why was she blushing? They’d been flipping caramel rolls. That was it. There had been nothing else going on, except perhaps in her sex-starved imagination. “What do you need?”

  “We’re down to our last caramel roll.” Q’s words came out in his usual easygoing manner, but his mouth quirked up on one side in a way that made Leah flush even more hotly. She warned her body firmly to knock it off. “How’s round two coming along?”

  “Three are flipped.” Her heart rate slowed and her face cooled at the prosaic question, one he asked every Saturday. “Give us thirty seconds, and we’ll get the last one de-panned and the whole lot of them up front.”

  “Done,” Hamilton said, sliding the last sheet pan of rolls onto the rack. It was, to Leah’s annoyance, perfectly centered, so much so that it made the one she’d just flipped look ever so slightly crooked.

  “Show-off,” she muttered, gaining a smug look from Hamilton and a confused one from Q.

  “Thanks.” Without bothering to ask what she’d been talking about, Q rolled the rack through the swinging door to the front.

  “What’s next?” Hamilton looked almost eager.

  As she made her way to the freezer, she said, “Let’s see if the cookie dough is cool enough to roll out.” She poked at it. “It’ll work.”

  Dividing the dough into two portions, she dropped Hamilton’s share onto his perfectly floured side of the table and her blob on her less-perfectly floured half. Earlier, before the battle of flipping caramel rolls, she’d been planning on giving him a smaller amount. Now, though, she was positive his roll-out would be perfect. Grabbing a toothpick and a Sharpie, she made a mark just above the tapered point and held it out to him.

  “You want to roll out your dough so that it’s this thick throughout.”

  Accepting the toothpick with an endearingly serious nod, as if he were embarking on some sort of universe-saving quest, Hamilton picked up his rolling pin. Before starting to use it, though, he paused, the pin poised above the dough.

  “Like this.” Leah showed him. “Flatten it out a little with your hands first. Then, you can use the rolling pin. You don’t want to smack it down. Just even, gentle pressure from the inside out.”

  After watching her make a few strokes with the rolling pin, Hamilton turned back to his own dough. They worked quietly for a few minutes. Every so often, Leah looked over, checking on Hamilton’s progress. She was impressed. He was a quick study, and his dough was looking very even for a beginner. Her quick glances started to focus less on the dough, and more on his face and his intent expression. She was fascinated by his concentration, by his determination to do it right, even something as simple and basic as rolling out cookie dough.

  She was so preoccupied by watching Hamilton that Leah almost rolled her own dough too thin on one side. Catching herself just in time, she gave herself a mental lecture. Having help with the cookies wouldn’t be much of a time-saver if she let herself get distracted. She concentrated on rolling out the thicker sections of the dough, allowing herself to fall into the calming rhythm of the movements. This was one of the things she loved about baking. Working with dough always calmed her, even when there were unexpected orders or when the ingredient deliveries were delayed or when customers were cranky.

  She checked the thickness, smiling in satisfaction when the toothpick sunk to the perfect depth. An annoyed grunt brought her attention back to Hamilton. He was trying to fix a thin spot and just making it worse.

  “The beauty of rolling out cookies,” Leah said, nudging him over as she picked up a pizza cutter, “is that the shape doesn’t matter. Croissants, on the other hand, are a bit trickier.” She cut out the section of too-thin dough, balled it up, and set it aside. “We’ll save this for the second round.”

  Hamilton frowned at his now Pac-Man–shaped dough but gamely started rolling it out again. Picking up the butterfly cookie cutter, Leah made an even row along the edge of her dough, making it a game to get as many cookies—and as few scraps—out of the first roll-out as possible. Hamilton
paused briefly, watching her, and Leah knew he was calculating the exact same thing.

  She did another row of butterflies before moving on to the daisy-shaped cutter. By the time she switched to hearts, Hamilton had checked his dough, frowned, and rolled it out three more times. He repeated the process twice more before giving a satisfied grunt and putting down his rolling pin.

  “Very nice,” Leah said, watching as he checked the depth in various spots again.

  Despite the compliment, he scowled at the dough. “It’s too thin here.”

  She paused, her cookie cutter poised in the air, and leaned closer to get a good look at the spot he was indicating. “Just trim the bottom few inches. The rest looks good.”

  As he cut off the thin strip, he asked, “Can we use any of those?” He gestured toward the box of cookie cutters.

  “The cookies are for a five-year-old’s birthday party. Don’t ask me why they need a hundred and forty-four decorated sugar cookies, plus a cake, for a child’s party. Those kids are going to be so hopped up on sugar. I pity the parents.” Hamilton was looking at her with his eyebrows raised, and she realized that she hadn’t answered his question. “Sorry. They want a spring theme. Flowers, butterflies, suns—I just use the round cutter for those—birds, bunnies, that sort of thing.”

  He picked through the cutters before holding one up. “What’s this?”

  “Ladybug. That’ll work. It helps to dip it in flour first.” She pushed the cake pan filled with flour closer to him.

  With a nod of thanks, he lowered the cutter into the flour with the same careful precision that he did everything. As usual, Leah watched him, torn between fond amusement and fascination as he lined up the cutter with infinite care. He pushed down, wiggling slightly as he’d watched her do, and then he pulled the cutter away. Gazing down at the ladybug shape he’d just made, Hamilton smiled. It was the sweetest, slightest upward curl of his lips, and Leah couldn’t stand it. She tore her gaze away from him and stared at the dough in front of her.