Battered to Death (Daphne Martin Cake Mysteries)

by Trent, Gayle

  “Whoo-hoo, Aunt Daphne!” I heard Lucas yell from the audience. “Way to go!”

  I smiled and winked at him. I was glad he and Jason had arrived in time to see the end of the competition.

  “Contestants, your time is up,” said Kimmie Compton. “No more work may be done on your cakes. Please step away from your tables.”

  Four chairs had been set up to the left of the audience members. Kimmie instructed us to go sit in the chairs while the judges perused the cakes. At last, I was able to look around and see what the other decorators had done.

  Pauline Wilson’s cake was an ivory wedding cake creation with a shell border and Cornelli lace. Like me, she used cookie crumbs to make a sandy covering for her cake board. Pauline also used the “sand” to decorate the top of her cake. The cake was sprinkled with shells she’d made using the candy mold supplied by one of the sponsors.

  The competitor to Pauline’s right was named Madge Koker. I’d never seen Madge before, but she was a short, heavyset woman with gray hair and kind blue eyes that were only slightly hidden by her glasses. Madge’s cake had been iced turquoise to look like water and was decorated with fondant fish and candy shells.

  The final competitor was Lou Gimmel. I smiled and gave Lou a little wave. He returned my smile and gave me a nod. His cake had been covered two-thirds of the way in blue frosting, with white waves cresting up over the cake to accommodate the fondant surfers who were riding the waves. The other third of the cake had been made to look like the beach, complete with fondant figures, a tiny sand castle, beach balls, chairs, and umbrellas. Lou’s cake worried me. I felt I was probably looking at the winning cake on his table. It was beautiful.

  As Kimmie Compton introduced the judges and then us, the competitors, Pauline Wilson glared at me. I had no idea what I’d done to deserve her ire, so I simply ignored her. As soon as Ms. Compton was finished with the introductions, however, I learned what Pauline’s problem was.

  She raised her hand in the air and shook it around like an elementary school student who needed to go to the bathroom. “Ms. Compton, I think Daphne Martin should be disqualified.”

  “And why do you feel that way, Ms. Wilson?” Ms. Compton asked.

  “Because she cut up her cake. She didn’t leave it in the traditional two tiers,” Pauline said.

  “There was nothing in the rules indicating that the cake had to remain in the shape in which you received it,” said Ms. Compton. “I appreciate your concern, but the judges will decide what is and isn’t appropriate and will be judging each cake based on its individual merits. Thank you.”

  I turned my attention to Violet, Leslie, Lucas, and Jason, who were sitting with Molly, Chris, and Alex. I was glad Leslie and Lucas had made friends with the boy. I was terribly sorry for what Alex had suffered at Chef Richards’s hands. That man had been hard enough to contend with for an adult. How on earth were children supposed to deal with him and walk away unscathed?

  Lucas got my attention and rolled his eyes before making a face in Pauline’s direction. I nearly laughed aloud. I shook my head slightly to try to dissuade him from acting up, but I eventually had to turn my attention elsewhere.

  Waiting for the judges to look at all the cakes, mark up their findings, and make their final decisions seemed to take forever. After one last consultation, they handed their final score sheets to Ms. Compton.

  Smiling, Ms. Compton took the microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen, we award only two prizes in this competition, even though all four of these cakes are outstanding, as you can see for yourselves. That said, the second place prize goes to Lou Gimmel.”

  We all clapped heartily for Lou. He received a certificate, a red ribbon, and a basket of gifts submitted by local merchants. I, for one, was shocked that he didn’t win. I was even more shocked when Ms. Compton called my name as the winner.

  I stood and accepted my prizes—a certificate, a blue ribbon, and a basket of local merchant gifts. “Thank you so much!” I exclaimed. “I can hardly believe it!”

  “I certainly can’t believe it,” Pauline said. She’d said it low enough that I doubted anyone in the audience had heard her, but I had and I thought the odds were pretty good that the other contestants and Kimmie Compton had heard her as well.

  “Let’s give Ms. Martin a round of applause,” Ms. Compton said coolly.

  The audience duly applauded, and Lucas shouted more “whoo-hoos” for his favorite—albeit only—aunt.

  Prior to leaving the competition area, we were allowed to pack up the items donated by the sponsors. As I was gathering my items into a large plastic bag, Lou Gimmel came over to me.

  “Great job,” he said.

  “Thank you,” I told him. “But your cake should’ve won. I truly thought it was the best.”

  “It was good, but you showed more imagination and creativity when you carved your cake,” said Lou.

  I laughed. “The main reason I did that was because I’m doing the carving demonstration in about half an hour, and I needed the practice.”

  He laughed too. “Makes sense. I’m demonstrating characters made of modeling chocolate later this afternoon.”

  “I’ll have to come and check it out,” I said. “Your characters and the objects on your beach cake were spot-on . . . and that sand castle? Priceless.”

  “Thanks.” He grinned. “I wondered if you’d like to have this.” He handed me a coupon for ten dollars off a cut and style at Tanya’s Tremendous Tress Taming Salon. “It was in my prize basket, and I seriously doubt I’ll use it.” He ran a hand over his buzz cut.

  “I doubt I’ll use it either, but I’ll give the coupon to my neighbor,” I said. “She’s a braver soul than I am.”

  “You don’t recommend the salon, then?” he asked.

  “You might come out okay,” I told him, “but my hair would be bigger than Texas.”

  Lou laughed and then excused himself as the thundering horde that is my family made their way to my table.

  “Aunt Daphne, your cake rocked!” said Leslie.

  “That guy who won second place had a cool cake too,” Lucas added. “But yours was the best.”

  “I’m so proud of you,” Violet said.

  “Good job,” said Molly. “Don’t you think Ms. Martin did a good job on her cake, Alex?”

  Alex nodded.

  “Lucas, what are you and your dad doing here so early?” I asked. “I thought you guys were going to a ball game.”

  “We went to do a little batting practice before going to watch the game, and we decided we’d rather be here,” Lucas said.

  “Really?” I asked.

  “Really,” Jason said with a smile. “We didn’t want to let our favorite bakers down.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  Leslie gave Jason a bear hug. “Yeah. Thanks, Dad. And you too, Lucas.”

  “Can we eat that winning cake now?” Chris asked teasingly. “I’m starving.”

  “I’m afraid not,” I said. “The judges will be taking the cakes to be photographed.”

  “I’m with you on the starving part,” Jason said to Chris, looking around the ballroom. “There have to be some food vendors around here somewhere.”

  I told Jason where the snack area I’d found earlier was located. “It’s where I met Molly, Alex, and Chris this morning.”

  “That’s all we’ve got in the way of food? Oh well. I know where that is. I’ll take you in that direction,” Chris told Jason. “Maybe we can sit down and at least talk about something other than cakes. I’d like to get my mind off the stuff if I can’t have a piece of any of them.”

  Lucas warmed to Chris’s line of thinking. “Yeah. What’s so great about a cake you can’t eat?”

  Molly shook her head. “All right, guys. Let’s go get a snack.”

  “Will you show us the video of Alex making the haunted house while we eat?” Leslie asked.

  “If it’s okay with Alex, I will,” Molly said.

  Alex nodded to give his
permission.

  “Daph, you coming?” Violet asked.

  “No. You guys go ahead. I have to get ready for the cake carving demonstration in about fifteen minutes, so I’ll eat the protein bar I dropped into my purse this morning.”

  “Are you sure?” she asked. “I’ll be happy to bring something over to you.”

  “That’s fine,” I said. “While I’m eating my bar, I want to walk around and see how my cakes are faring.”

  Her eyes widened. “Check on Leslie’s too, would you?”

  “I will,” I said with a grin.

  As it turned out, I went by the children’s table first. Leslie’s cheeseburger-and-fries cake had accumulated quite a few pennies, but I made a mental note to get some change after the cake carving demonstration so I could further contribute to the voting process. No one had said spectators could only vote once, and I saw plenty of relatives dumping pennies into cups. I didn’t want Leslie to feel that her own family had let her down. Besides, I knew the pennies were going to a good cause. They were being collected for donation to the local food bank.

  My cakes seemed to be doing well from a spectator-penny-vote point of view as well. I only hoped the judges would be as generous as the spectators. I was sizing up the other cakes in the three-dimensional novelty cake category when Myra rushed up to me and almost knocked me sideways.

  “Congratulations on winning the beach cake contest,” she said.

  “Thanks!” I smiled.

  “I knew you could do it. What did that nasty little Pauline Wilson say when you won?” she asked. “I know she said something, but I couldn’t hear what it was.”

  “She said she couldn’t believe I won.” I shrugged. “Frankly, I thought Lou Gimmel deserved the grand prize, but I’m glad the judges disagreed.”

  “Lou Gimmel,” Myra said. “His was the one with the surfboards and the sand castle, right?”

  “That’s the one,” I said.

  “It was pretty . . . not as pretty as yours, of course, but it was my second pick,” she said.

  I gave her a one-armed hug. “Thanks. Oh, by the way, Lou gave me the ten-dollar coupon to Tanya’s salon that was in his prize basket. He has a buzz cut and lives in South Carolina, so he didn’t feel he had a use for it.”

  “Probably not,” she said.

  “Do you want it?” I asked.

  “Sure!”

  I took it from my purse and handed it to her. “Would you mind considering it partial payment for all the detective work you’re doing on my behalf ?”

  “I’ll be happy to.” She frowned slightly. “Of course, Mark is helping too. You think I should give him the coupon?”

  “Nah. I’ll bake him a cake,” I said.

  “Ooh, then I’ll get a double win!” She giggled. “I can get my hair done and help him eat his cake!”

  I laughed before glancing at my watch. “I’d better eat right quick.” I took the protein bar from my purse, opened it, and took a bite.

  “That’s lunch, honey?” Myra asked.

  I nodded.

  “Make Ben buy you a nice dinner, then,” she said.

  “Have you heard any chatter about Chef Richards?” I asked.

  “Not anything specific. Everybody seems to agree that he was a jerk. Mark is looking into the ex-wife’s whereabouts.” Myra gazed around the room. “He said he’d come by and let me know as soon as he finds out something.”

  I swallowed. “Thank you. I appreciate that. I wish it would be something as simple as a murder of passion carried out by an angry ex-wife. Then I’d be off the hook, and everything would be hunky-dory. I’m just afraid I’m not that lucky.”

  “Well . . . we can hope.” Myra took a tissue out of her purse. “Here. You’ve got chocolate on your face.” She wiped my face with the tissue. “Let me see your teeth.”

  I glanced around self-consciously before baring my teeth to Myra.

  “They’re good,” she said.

  I gave her a quick hug before I hurried away. I might have a distant relationship with my own mom, but Myra more than makes up for it in times like these.

  10

  BY THE time spectators had begun filling up the metal folding chairs and risers in front of the demonstration table, I had a fairly firm grasp on how I was going to carry out the carving to make the cake look like a delivery van. When I’d done an antique pink Cadillac cake for the Elvis impersonators’ convention a couple of months back, I’d used a stencil made from an enlarged photo of the exact type of car I was trying to replicate. With the van, it would be mostly guesswork. A van wouldn’t be as complicated as a vintage car, though. I also wouldn’t be doing the van as a three-dimensional cake—simply carving it into the shape of a van in order to illustrate the technique—so I was pretty confident I’d be able to pull it off.

  About five minutes before my demonstration was to begin, an event volunteer hurried over to hook me up to a wireless microphone. I thanked him, and the audience tittered as my voice thundered throughout the ballroom. The volunteer adjusted the volume on my mike.

  “Good afternoon,” I said. “I’m Daphne Martin, and I’ll be showing you how to carve rectangular layer cakes into the shape of a van. I’m a last-minute replacement for the person who was supposed to do this demonstration, so I have no idea what he’d planned to do. However, I’ll do my best to teach you how to carve the cake and to answer any questions you might have.” I looked around at the audience. “Does anyone have any questions prior to my starting the demonstration?”

  A lady raised her hand and asked what the best types of cake for carving were.

  “For carving flat cakes, just about any type of cake will do fine,” I answered. “However, if you’re carving a three-dimensional cake, you’ll need a denser, sturdier cake, such as a Madeira or pound cake.”

  A muscular young man asked if the cake needed to be frozen prior to carving.

  “That’s entirely a matter of personal preference,” I said. “It can also depend on how much time the baker has. Sometimes you get an order, and you need to carve something and have it ready quickly. At other times, you can make the cake at a more leisurely pace. I prefer the cakes to have been in the refrigerator, so they’re firmer than they would be at room temperature, but not frozen when I carve.”

  Clea Underwood piped up from the back of the audience with, “I understand that Chef Richards was supposed to do this demo before he was . . . well, before he died. . . . Is that correct?”

  “It is,” I said. “And now, if you’ll please hold the remainder of your questions until after the demonstration—or during, if you have a relevant question about the procedure—then I’ll go ahead and begin carving our delivery van cake.”

  I spread a chocolate ganache filling on one of the long, rectangular pound cakes and then placed the other cake on top of it. “If I’d planned on doing this van as a three-dimensional cake, then I’d have cut the two cakes in half to make two additional cakes and then stacked them to facilitate sculpting all four sides of the cake. The van would have been smaller, but it would’ve stood upright. This cake will be larger and, in fact, easier to create.”

  I explained how cake carving is a lot like sculpting in that one starts with a larger design and then refines it to take the desired shape. I roughed out the outline of a van and then kept chiseling until the audience could see it too.

  “You might want to make the design just a little bit larger than you intend it to be,” I said. “The buttercream and fondant coatings will make the shape smaller once they’re applied. Also, don’t throw away the cake you’ve cut away. Save it and make cake pops!”

  Someone immediately asked about cake pops. I was surprised by the question, since cake pops are so popular these days. Still, I explained that cake pops were cake mixed with frosting, formed into balls or some other shape, placed onto a lollipop stick, and then dipped into a candy coating.

  I crumb-coated the cake and then covered it in white fondant. I cut around the win
dshield, windows, and wheels and used various cake tips to ice those details. Then I took a fine brush dipped in pink gel color and wrote Daphne’s Delectable Cakes on the side of the van. I rinsed the brush, dipped it in black gel color, and outlined the letters in my logo before drawing the silhouette of a wedding cake beneath it.

  I turned to the audience with a flourish. “And there you have it. Any other questions?”

  “Why did you paint on the cake rather than use a writing tip?” asked a woman to my left.

  “I wanted the writing on the van to look more like my logo and less like writing on a cake,” I said. “I wanted it to appear more realistic. That’s a wonderful plus to using fondant—you can paint some beautiful designs on it that you’d be hard-pressed to re-create in icing.”

  After everyone with questions had been satisfactorily answered—with the exception of Clea Underwood, of course—some audience members filed by the table for a closer look at the cake.

  “Great job, Aunt Daphne,” Leslie said.

  “Yeah,” Lucas said. He grinned. “The only way you could’ve made it any better would be to have the headlights and horn work.”

  I tilted my head toward Alex. “I wouldn’t even know how to begin to do that. Would you, Alex?”

  He nodded, and then looked up at his mother.

  Molly encouraged him to tell me how to incorporate lights into my design.

  Alex spoke so softly that we all had to lean closer in order to hear him. “Before covering the cake with fondant, you could’ve carved a little hole where the headlight would be. Then you would have put a battery-powered LED light into the hole.” He looked at Lucas. “The same principle would apply to the horn. Just put some battery-operated device into the cake where you could push a button and hear the horn blow. It’s not hard.”

  “Cool!” Lucas shouted. “You’re like Chef Duff and Buddy the Cake Boss and all those other guys rolled into one!”

  Alex smiled slightly and then lowered his head. “It’s not hard,” he repeated. “You’d just have to be careful that no one got a piece of cake with a mechanical device in it. That could be dangerous.”