Page 35 of The Three of Us
She smiles to herself. Brenda and Steve will make wonderful grandparents, just as her own parents will. The only problem is going to be the two couples battling over who is going to be first to meet the newcomer and who gets first push of the pram.
‘Boy or girl?’ Brenda had asked, once the phone had been passed over to Molly and all the congratulations were out of the way.
‘We don’t know yet. We’ll get the chance to find out at the twenty-week scan.’
‘But which would you like?’
‘I really don’t mind.’
‘I must admit I always wished I’d had a little girl. Oh, not that I don’t love my boys, as you well know, but my life’s been all about standing around at football matches and tripping over toy cars. And then the obsession with real cars, once they hit seventeen, and worrying myself sick about them out driving at night. Not to mention all the scraped knees and torn trousers and muddy boots…’
‘I’m sure girls can be just as bad. I remember I was always falling over, and loads of girls play football these days.’
‘I know. It just would have been nice to have a doll’s house around the place, and to be able to have a go at plaiting hair or knitting something pink for a change… Oh, don’t listen to me. The world’s changed and I don’t suppose anyone does all that pink or blue stuff anymore.’
As Molly stirs the cake mixture, last night’s conversation keeps popping back into her head. Brenda was wrong. People do still do all that pink or blue stuff. It’s everywhere she looks. Pink teddies, blue teddies, pink bedding, blue bedding, ‘Welcome to the new baby’ cards, almost all in either pink or blue. It’s traditional. In fact, just a couple of months ago, before they’d left Norfolk, she had been to an old friend’s baby shower and had been met by a whole room decorated with pink balloons and pink bunting, and they had all eaten off pink paper plates and drunk pink champagne. There had been absolutely no doubt that the baby was going to be a girl.
That was it! Babies mean celebrations, and celebrations mean cake! Lots of lovely cake. There has to be a demand, a big demand, for cakes made of pink or blue sponge, or covered in pink or blue icing. And biscuits too, shaped like teddies or bootees, and iced in the appropriate colour. Celebrating a birth or a christening. She wondered just how many babies were born in England, in London, even just in their own small area, every year, every month, every day? There would always be a demand, always parents and families somewhere wanting to celebrate with cake.
But, how about before the birth? Baby showers and gender reveals were a big thing these days, weren’t they? The party she had been to was already awash with pink because the news was already out, but how about those occasions when a couple want to reveal the baby’s sex for the first time? Inviting their friends and family round or making a video to share on social media, where they pull a cracker with a flurry of pink confetti cascading out from inside, or let loose a host of blue balloons to escape up into the sky? This is it. She’s onto something. Gender-reveal cakes. That’s what she can specialise in. Beautiful cakes with something pink or blue hidden in the middle, something you only discover once they are cut open or bitten into. Everyone picking one up and taking that first bite at the same time, the squeals when they all find out together…
Molly can feel the excitement mounting. There’s something about cakes that has always excited her. The mixing, the adding of a new ingredient, the waiting to see how it comes out of the oven, the warm spongey top springing beneath her fingertip, the gorgeous smell that wafts through the kitchen, the thrill of planning and decorating. But this is different. It’s a new kind of excitement, the start of something.
She wanted a business idea and now she has one. And there will be a market for it, she’s sure there will. All the midwife appointments she will be going to, the clinics, the classes, the mums-to-be who she will meet. All she has to do is make up some samples, take photos, perhaps give a few cakes away to get reviews and opinions, print out some flyers or cards. She hasn’t felt so positive, so enthusiastic about anything for a long time. It’s time to let the ideas flow, to try things out, to mix and experiment and taste…
‘Thanks, Brenda,’ she mutters, as she reaches for a bottle of red food colouring and watches her mixture turning pink as she stirs.
Jack comes home expecting dinner but all she has made is cake.
‘Bloody hell, Mol. What’s all this lot for? Are we having a party?’
Molly looks at her watch. She has lost all track of time. ‘Sorry, no, just trying out some recipe ideas. I didn’t realise it’s so late. Do you mind waiting to eat?’
‘No hurry. I’ll just go and get changed, then we can sort some food out, even if it’s just scrambled eggs or something. One of these will keep me going for now.’ He picks up a cupcake from the nearest plate and takes a big bite. It’s too late to stop him.
‘No! Jack…’
Molly hears him coughing before he’s even made it to the bedroom. He comes back, a bit red in the face, a sticky coughed-up mess all over his fingers.
‘What the hell is this?’ he says, holding out his hand. ‘I could have broken a tooth. Or choked to death.’
Molly knows she shouldn’t laugh but she does. ‘That’ll teach you not to help yourself without asking first,’ she says, reaching out and picking the glass marble out from among the crumbs. ‘It was just a test run. How to hide things inside a cake. I didn’t have any little teddy sweets or packets of edible glitter lying around, so I just used any old things I could find. You weren’t actually meant to eat it.’
He looks at her as if she’s totally mad. ‘Teddies?’ he says. ‘Glitter? And why on earth are you baking cakes nobody’s meant to eat?’
‘Experimenting, that’s all. With shapes and sizes and what fits in without any bits left sticking out and giving the game away.’
He looks at her as if she’s gone completely mad.
‘Just count yourself lucky I’d popped the marble in after it was baked and not before,’ she says. ‘A red-hot lump of glass could have been really dangerous!’ She picks up another cupcake and cuts through the teetering dome of white buttercream that she has piled on top to conceal the hidey hole. The knife slides into the cake beneath, a cake that looks a very satisfying shade of bright baby-boy blue on the inside, and out from the centre pours a pile of pink Smarties. Would that work? For twins? One of each? Or should she try some sort of split-down-the-middle dual-colour cake? She’s so fired up with ideas that she hardly notices Jack retreating to the bedroom, shaking his head.
Chapter 21
Jack
The IT project is coming on so well that the boss thinks it’s time to test it out properly. That’s why Jack has been hired, to lead on the testing, to get the new financial program set up on a few of the company computers alongside the existing one and choose a small group of staff from across all departments to start putting it through its paces. A trial run to iron out any problems before it goes ‘live’. Jack didn’t write the software, but he knows its success depends on him.
The whole idea of it makes him think about Molly and her cakes, testing out some new recipe on an unsuspecting guinea pig, otherwise known as her own husband, to see what works and what doesn’t, what adaptations might be needed before it’s let loose on anyone else. She’s right, of course. New things do need to be properly tried and tested, although burying a lump of glass inside a cupcake might just have been a step too far. His own fault, according to her, for jumping in and biting into what was simply a prototype, without asking her first.