Twelve Short Stories of Christmas 7: Christmas Cake

Day six can be read here.

The recipe said it would taste like mulled wine. The recipe also said it would only take an hour to make and Louise had taken twice that time preparing the ingredients. It was now in the oven and she was double checking she had followed the recipe, put in all the right amounts when it said so. She had. Definitely. But when she looked through the glass door of the oven the cake rising inside didn’t look anything like the picture in the glossy recipe book and her kitchen just smelt of cake. Not mulled wine cake at all.

When at long last the timer went off and the cake was done, she took it out and let it cool. She couldn’t resist trying a piece when it was still hot. Besides, she needed to test whether it did taste like mulled wine after all. She cut a tiny slither and ate it. It didn’t taste like mulled wine. It didn’t taste too bad, but it was not what she had imagined from reading the recipe.

She didn’t wait for it to cool. She couldn’t take this cake, could she? The next day at work when everyone else was sampling all the foods people had brought in for the last day of work before Christmas, Louise tried to hide her cake so no-one would eat it but Mickey noticed and came over to her. “Is this the famous mulled wine cake I heard you were going to make?” he asked, pointing to the cake on his plate.

Louise nodded, wondering what he would say about her gone-wrong recipe. “Well, you must have cooked it in the dark,” he laughed. “You made it with Bailey’s instead of wine! Though I do prefer this to wine I must say,” he said picking up the slice of cake and putting the whole thing in his mouth at once.