Christmas at the Beach Cafe(4)

The book had been one of my so-called brainwaves a few weeks ago: a way of thanking all my customers and new friends in Carrawen Bay by giving them a compilation of Jo’s best recipes. Ed, of course, was doing the honours in the kitchen (I was a woman who couldn’t boil an egg, after all), while I took photographs of each finished dish to go alongside the instructions. Recipes From The Beach Café was going to be sheer class.

Back when the idea first popped into my head, I thought I was on to a total winner, already imagining the smiles of gratitude and cries of delight from the recipients as I pressed beautiful little books into their hands. I had allowed myself to get carried away with visions of a display in the windows of the local bookshops. I might even be asked to sign copies for interested tourists, I had daydreamed. It could happen, couldn’t it?

The only problem was, when it actually came to making this happen, it wasn’t quite as easy as I’d hoped. Originally I had (rather ambitiously, admittedly) envisaged us pulling the whole thing together over a weekend, but it was turning out to involve way more work than that. Ed – of course – was acting like a total perfectionist, fussing about every dish he produced and rejecting anything that had even the titchiest flaw. Secretly, it was starting to drive me nuts. Secretly, my patience had become stretched extremely thin.

Take the apple tart, for instance, the week before. He’d baked a mouth-watering, golden-pastry delight which looked absolutely perfect to my eyes – but no, he’d said it wasn’t good enough to be photographed for the book because there was a scorch mark on the crust. A scorch mark, let me make clear, that was so small you practically needed a microscope to see it. ‘I’ll just turn it round so it’s not obvious in the photo,’ I assured him. ‘Or use some Photoshop magic to even out the colour. No one will notice.’

‘Nope,’ he’d replied. ‘I’ll make another one.’

‘Oh, but Ed – ’

‘Everyone will know it’s my cooking, Evie. And we’re promoting the café here, remember. I just want everything to look good.’

‘But this does look good!’

‘Not good enough. Standards, Evie, come on.’

Standards. Right. Before I’d known him, Ed had owned a fancy restaurant in London, where he’d cheffed to very high standards, by all accounts. Fair enough. But this was the Beach Café, and a home-made recipe book – we weren’t exactly talking Michelin stars here. Well, I wasn’t, anyway.

But what did I know? Another apple tart had to be baked before Ed was satisfied while I escaped to the beach, a safe distance from the café, and let out a long, ear-splitting scream of frustration. (Nobody was around, thankfully. Although having said that, the villagers were all used to me by now, and wouldn’t have batted an eyelid if they’d seen me screeching into the wind like a banshee.)

Add in the often-illegible scrawl of my aunt’s recipes, which resulted in transcription problems, and the growing realization that, actually, you needed quite a lot of recipes to make a decent-sized book as opposed to a pathetic little pamphlet . . . and my brilliant brainwave was fast turning into an enormous brain-ache. So far, we had completed pages for Idiot-Proof Scones (the first – and pretty much last – thing I had ever baked in the Beach Café kitchen), Jo’s Legendary Fruity Flapjacks, Apple Tart Extraordinaire (second time lucky), Best Bacon Butty (Ed’s recipe) and Triple-Decker Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting. That made a paltry five pages in all, with at least another twenty to go. I was starting to wish the stupid idea had never occurred to me in the first place.

But I was nothing if not an optimist. Besides, having already told quite a lot of people about the project, I kind of had to go through with it now. That would teach me to go shooting my mouth off, wouldn’t it?

Probably not.

‘Mince pies, here we come,’ I said now, rifling through the folder where Jo had stuffed all her recipes over the decades. Many of them bore evidence of their years of service, with faded handwriting and oily fingerprints on the paper. A couple even had speckles of flour on their surfaces. I loved the thought of these treasured instructions being passed on to Jo’s friends and customers. If Ed could just chill out on the perfectionist front we might even finish the damn book in time for Christmas, too . . .

‘Whoa, whoa, whoa,’ he said at that moment. ‘Aren’t you jumping the gun a bit? We need a mincemeat recipe first, remember.’

‘A what?’

‘Well, you need mincemeat to make mince pies,’ he said.