One Last Bite_A Darling Bakery Cozy Mystery

by Brenda De Witt

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  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

  One Last Bite

  A Darling Bakery Cozy Mystery

  By

  Brenda DeWitt

  Copyright ©2018 by Brenda DeWitt

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the authors imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Chapter 1

  All eyes were on Dani Darling as she spooned coconut flour into a glass bowl sitting on top of the small food scale and continued to talk through the recipe for her gluten-free German Chocolate cupcakes.

  “The trick is to know which kind of flour to use for which baked goods,” she said as she lifted the bowl from the scale. “Since we’re making German Chocolate cupcakes, coconut flour works great because the slight coconut flavor it gives the batter will blend nicely with the coconut in the frosting.”

  Dani’s two new assistants, Matt and Rhonda, nodded in unison, but Dani could still see the skepticism in their eyes. Dani wasn’t sure what it was going to take to convince the pair that she knew what she was doing, but she had to try. They were her only hope.

  It seemed like she’d interviewed every job seeker in Riley — a small rural Georgia town about three hours south of Atlanta —searching for the perfect assistants to help her reopen the bakery her grandparents had started years before Dani was even born. In Matt and Rhonda, Dani knew she had found the best candidates by far — even if they were a little apprehensive about Dani’s baking abilities.

  Dani had spent weeks going over the hand-written recipes her grandmother kept in a little wooden box that her grandfather made for her the year the bakery opened. Dani painstakingly converted each of the recipes — testing what kind of gluten-free flour worked best for which cake batter — until each item tasted as good as the traditional way her grandmother made them.

  For the most part, Matt and Rhonda were catching on quickly. But there were still a few occasions, like today, when Dani could tell that they’d rather pull out a generic bag of all-purpose flour and follow the recipe as it was originally written.

  “What in the world is xanthan gum?” Rhonda asked staring at the new recipe card with a frown.

  “It’s a chemically produced thickening agent,” Dani explained as she stirred the last ingredients into the batter and the smell of chocolate filled the room. “But I’ve found a better natural ingredient to use. It’s called guar gum — made from guar beans.”

  “You put beans in the cake batter?” Matt asked frowning just as he was about to lick some of the chocolaty batter off the back of a tasting spoon. At the mention of the unusual ingredient he froze — spoon in mid-air.

  Even though neither Matt or Rhonda were old enough to have tried any of Dani’s grandmother’s baked goods when the store was still open, they — along with most of Riley’s residents — had heard stories about Helen Darling’s cakes. The Darling Bakery had been so popular that the town council even named a special day in its honor when Dani’s grandmother finally closed the bakery and retired.

  “Don’t worry. I guarantee that these cupcakes will taste as good, if not better than my grandmother’s German Chocolate cake,” Dani said with confidence ignoring the looks on her assistants’ faces as she poured batter into the paper-lined cupcake pans. “I wouldn’t dare put the Darling name on them if they weren’t going to be good. I care about my grandmother’s reputation too much to settle for anything but the best. Plus, if I tried to sell anything with the Darling name on it that wasn’t good Nana would definitely come back from the grave and haunt me.”

  Dani looked up at the picture of her grandmother hanging on the wall and winked at it affectionately.

  “When did your grandmother open the bakery?” Rhonda asked.

  “In 1948,” Dani said, her voice filled with pride. “But Nana had been selling her baked goods long before that. While my grandfather was away in the war, Nana started baking to make a little extra money. There was a wartime ration on butter and sugar so a lot of women stopped baking altogether. Nana was one of the few women around Riley who could make cakes and pies that tasted just as good using molasses and lard.”

  Matt’s face contorted into a grimace. “Molasses and lard? I guess we should be glad you’re not using those recipes.”

  Dani let out a big laugh. “Well, from the stories I’ve heard no one was complaining. In fact, when Grandfather Harold got back home Nana had accumulated quite a bit of savings from her baking. He quickly realized that Nana had started a business that could actually support the family if they expanded a little. He used his VA benefits to refinance their house and used the extra money to put a down payment on this building and The Darling Bakery opened for business!”

  Dani carefully wiped the spilled batter off the edges of the pans and then carried them over to the shiny new 10-rack industrial oven in the corner. She placed each of the baking pans into the oven and then carefully closed the door.

  The first official batch of cupcakes made in the newly re-opened Darling Bakery. Dani smiled with satisfaction as she gazed out the window that ran the length of the kitchen. The view allowed passersby to see the baking process in action, but at the moment her only audience was her new baking staff.

  Dani had inherited the building that housed the original Darling Bakery when her grandmother passed away three years ago, but she had to put a lot of work into getting it back in running order.

  In the years after Nana closed the bakery she’d rented the space to a hair salon and sold off all of the baking equipment, so Dani basically had to start from scratch when she’d decided to reopen the bakery instead of selling the building.

  With the help of a small re-fi loan she’d been able to bring everything up to code for an industrial kitchen, but the oven was the only new item she’d been able to afford. She found everything else by scrounging around used appliance stores or lucking up on a few equipment sales from restaurants in Atlanta that had closed.

  The food industry was a rough business and a lot of places only lasted a year or so if they were lucky. Dani certainly hoped the new Darling Bakery would last as long as the old one had.

  “Okay, let’s get these mixing bowls washed,” she said turning back to her assistants. “Then we can get started on the frosting.”

  In spite of Dani’s enthusiasm, Rhonda’s face was still contorted and Matt was still staring at the batter on the spoon as if it was poisonous.

  Dani snatched the spoon from his hand and licked the back of it. “Yum!” she said with an honest smile. “You don’t know what you’re missing!”

&nbs
p; Dani’s feelings weren’t hurt by her assistants’ skepticism. Her reaction hadn’t been much better when her doctor in Atlanta, where she’d been living since finishing culinary school, first told her that she had Celiac disease and was going to have to take gluten entirely out of her diet. In fact, she was devastated.

  “But I thought all that gluten-free stuff was just something advertisers made up to get people to buy new products,” she’d whined. “I didn’t think it was a real thing.”

  “Oh, it’s very real,” Dr. Kent said in a somber voice. “And according to these test results, gluten intolerance is the reason you’ve been having so many digestive challenges lately.”

  Digestive challenges was putting it mildly. The phrase made what Dani had been going through for the previous six months sound much more polite than what she’d actually been experiencing.

  At first, she just thought her stomach was upset because she’d been under a lot of stress after her recent breakup with Brad — her boyfriend of three years. One day when Dani paid a surprise visit to the gym where Brad worked out religiously, she caught him and a buxom blond yoga instructor in the yoga mat closet practicing a version of downward dog that Dani doubted was part of the general class instruction.

  Dani was stunned at the sight but had no interest in giving Brad the satisfaction of seeing her meltdown in the middle of a public place. Especially not in front of the super-fit yoga instructor. Instead, Dani crept out of the gym, went immediately to Brad’s apartment and packed up all of her things. She left her torn up gym membership card on the floor for him to find as an obvious clue to her sudden disappearance.

  In hindsight she should have known something was going on. Brad used to badger her about working out all the time. They had a joint membership that Dani rarely used. When Brad stopped asking Dani if she was going to the gym after work, Dani thought he’d finally come to accept that her job as a pastry chef meant she liked twisting dough, but not her body, into the shape of a pretzel. But that hadn’t been his reason at all.

  As if losing a relationship wasn’t stressful enough, a month later, she returned home after a long day at the restaurant, to find a notice on her door informing her that her apartment was going condo and she had 90 days to purchase her unit or find a new place to live.

  But wait, there’s more! Didn’t bad news always come in threes?

  While Dani was trying to adjust to her new life as a single woman and mourning the loss of the apartment she loved, the third and final brick fell. She showed up at work one day to find a CLOSED sign on the restaurant door and a note that simply said: “Due to situations beyond our control Le Petite Maison will be closed permanently.” Dani later found out that the owners hadn’t been paying their taxes and were now facing criminal charges by the IRS for tax evasion.

  Suddenly faced with no job, no boyfriend and soon to be homeless, Dani’s body rebelled.

  That’s when she started getting sick every time she ate. She hardly knew what to expect from one meal to the next. Sometimes she had cramps and felt nauseous, sometimes things just — well, stopped up — and other times it felt like everything was moving through her like an inconvenient internal speedboat. By the time she went to see her doctor, she’d been reduced to living off of chicken broth and sautéd kale.

  “But my grandparents ran a bakery for most of their lives,” Dani exclaimed in protest when Dr. Kent first broke the news about her gluten intolerance. “I spent every summer of my childhood following my grandmother around the kitchen tasting everything she made — cakes, pies, bread, you name it — and I never had any issues. She’s the reason I became a pastry chef! What am I supposed to do now?”

  Dr. Kent had patiently explained the nature of the disease and the fact that it sometimes surfaced without explanation after a patient had lived a lifetime without any gluten sensitivity issues. He couldn’t discount the possibility that the disease might have been triggered by the stress she was under, but he was pretty confident that it wasn’t something that was going to go away now that it was here.

  “Why don’t you go stay at Nana’s for a while?” Dani’s mother suggested one night when Dani called her crying about everything that was going wrong in her life.

  Dani’s parents had left Riley and moved to Tallahassee, Florida just before Dani was born because her father got a great job offer there. They tried to get Dani’s grandparents to move with them, but they wouldn’t hear of it. Even after Grandfather Harold passed away no one could convince Nana to move out of Riley. She lived there her whole life and that was where she passed away peacefully in her sleep three years ago.

  “The house has just been sitting there unoccupied since the Wilson family moved out last month and I wasn’t really looking forward to finding another tenant,” Dani’s mother said.

  Dani was surprised that her first reaction wasn’t to burst out in laughter. Riley was a nice place to visit when Dani was a kid, but she never imagined being a resident of such a small town. Especially not as a 27-year-old woman. But, without a job, soon to be without an apartment and constantly haunted by the possibility of running into Brad somewhere, escaping to small-town life seemed like the perfect answer.

  It wasn’t as if Dani had expected a marching band to meet her at the city limits when she moved to Riley, but she also wasn’t expecting such resistance to her trying to reopen the family business. The first hurdle was getting the current tenant, Beatrice’s Beauty Salon, to move out. Beatrice Campbell had been running the salon of more than six years. She’d bought the business from Wendy’s Wash and Go, the tenant Dani’s grandmother had originally leased the building to.

  It was only after Dani sent the letter informing Beatrice that her lease wouldn’t be renewed, that she found out Beatrice was actually hoping to buy the building from Dani’s family. So before Dani could even get the new Darling Bakery sign up, Beatrice was already circulating vicious rumors about Dani putting her and her business out on the street with no notice.

  On top of the struggle with Beatrice, it took Dani four months to convince the bank that the business could be successful.

  In all fairness, it wasn’t because the bank doubted Dani’s baking abilities. Her degree from Le Cordon Bleu and six years at one of Atlanta’s top restaurants was proof that she could bake. It was just that when she announced that she was going to open a gluten-free bakery no one knew what to make of it.

  “Yeah, folks here aren’t really big on the fancy trends that go over well in big cities like Atlanta,” Matt said as he piped a dollop of coconut frosting on top of each cupcake.

  But Dani had been optimistic and persistent. She knew that a lot of people had intestinal issues they just didn’t know gluten was the cause of their distress. If she could just get the people in the town to try her cupcakes, she knew The Darling Bakery would once again be the town’s pride and joy.

  ***

  By Saturday morning the shelves of the Darling Bakery were filled with three different kinds of cupcakes, German Chocolate, Lemon Meringue and Red Velvet.

  “So, what’s this big plan you have to get customers to break down your door?” Gretchen asked as she leaned across the table inhaling the combined sweet and tart fragrance of the lemon meringue cupcake sitting in front of her.

  Gretchen West was one of the few people Dani knew from her childhood summer visits to Riley. When Gretchen graduated from high school she left to study journalism at Georgia State University in Atlanta, but she knew right away she wasn’t cut out for big city life. After Gretchen earned her degree she moved back to Riley and joined the staff of the local paper — now, six years later she was the editor-in-chief.

  Dani watched her friend nod appreciatively after taking a big bite of the cupcake.

  “I hired a couple of high school kids to hand these coupons out all over town last week.” Dani pulled a piece of paper from her apron pocket and handed it to Gretchen.

  Gretchen swallowed and read the first lines of the flier out loud. “The
Darling Bakery grand re-opening Saturday, June 9th. FREE cupcake with coupon. No purchase necessary!”

  Gretchen looked at her friend over the rim of her glasses. “You mean you’re going to give away everything in the store and not charge people anything?” Gretchen surveyed the various cupcakes lining the display shelves.