Vanishing Falls by Poppy Gee

Author:Poppy Gee [Gee, Poppy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780062978493
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-05-27T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

Wednesday, August 30

Joelle

The Smithtons’ house

A pavlova decorated with strawberries, kiwi fruit, and passion-fruit seeds was on the front cover of The Australian Women’s Weekly Basic Cookbook. It was Joelle’s second-favorite recipe book and had been a wedding gift from Darla, along with the Dinner Party Cookbook and the Children’s Birthday Cake Book. She liked them all, but the birthday cake book was the best. Without saying anything, Darla had made it clear that she expected Joelle to have kids. The pages were splattered and there were only three cakes she had not yet made—the piano, the castle, and the log cabin.

Joelle had never used the Dinner Party Cookbook. Teatime was best when it was just her and Brian and the twins. Once, they had invited one of Brian’s suppliers and his wife to have dinner at their house, but it had been hectic with Joelle so busy making sure everyone had drinks and something to talk about that the roast lamb had burned. Everyone laughed about it. But when the supplier made a good-natured joke about a butcher’s wife not knowing how to cook meat Brian had stopped laughing. Knowing that Brian could not bear someone being unkind to her, Joelle said, “It’s just a joke, Brian.”

Baking was something she preferred to do alone. You needed to set your mind to it, if you wanted to do it right. Joelle was very good at it. She made the same treats, again and again: melting moments, chocolate chip cookies, marble cake, and delicious cinnamon banana loaf. Brian said her sponge cakes were as fluffy as if she had whipped white summer clouds into the mixture; her lemon meringue pie made him close his eyes when he tasted it. Usually, her cakes did not look like the illustrations, but Brian said it was how they tasted that mattered. It was a mystery to both of them why her cakes never won a prize at the Vanishing Falls Royal Show baking competition.

She liked the process, the order of taking out the flour and measuring it into the bowl, melting the butter, folding the wet mixture into the dry mixture. She liked scraping the batter into the baking dish or pressing the damp balls of dough flat onto the baking tray with a fork. First Darla, then Miss Gwen, had helped her to make each recipe a few times. After that, she never had a problem remembering how to make each item. The list of ingredients helped remind her what to do. So long as you followed the recipe, nothing went wrong.

She opened the Basic book for inspiration. Trying to choose between the kiss biscuits and the melting moments was a big decision. Once a month Miss Gwen asked her to bake something to sell at the Country Women’s Association shop. It was one of the places where Miss Gwen volunteered and they raised money to help farming families. Miss Gwen had said the kiss biscuits sold better. Joelle knew that meant she should bake them, but the melting moments looked so much more special.

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