The Parisian Christmas Bake Off Read Online Free PDF Page A

asked George.
    Rachel made a face across the table, trying to encourage him to be a bit more tactful with his questions.
    ‘Pretty big,’ said Cheryl, blushing again, her hair getting further over her face. ‘To lose it I had to relearn about food. Learn to cook.’
    ‘But all them cakes—aren’t you tempted?’
    She shook her head. ‘I make them for my family, or for the neighbours. It’s the baking that hooks me. I just love it and for some reason I’ve found that if I make it, I don’t eat it.’ She laughed for the first time.
    Everyone smiled but Rachel saw Ali do a little eye roll behind his beer to himself. As if Cheryl was easy pickings.
    ‘I’ve got to go,’ she whispered to Abby.
    ‘Really, no? Don’t go. We’re getting to know each other.’
    The last thing Rachel needed was these probing, nosy questions and people sizing her up as competition. ‘Yeah, I really should go.’
    ‘Will we see you tomorrow?’
    ‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t think so.’
    Rachel walked to the bus stop and when the bus didn’t come she walked back all the way to her dingy flat. There was thin drizzle in the night air, the droplets flecking in the beam of the overhead lights. All the narrow streets were lit with Christmas stars that had been twined up the lampposts and tinsel hung from windows and around doors. Outside the churches little nativity scenes glowed bright, but she barely noticed.
    When she got to her building she stopped and looked up—at the blazing light from Madame Charles’s and then to the dark shutters in the roof—and thought of her lovely flat at home. Everything arranged just as she liked it. No surprises. All warm and cosy and hers.
    Trudging up the stairs, she wished she were back home—sitting on her lumpy sofa, marking homework with smiley faces, secretly weeping at
The
X Factor
—rather than here, in this draughty loft, baking with a load of strangers.
    Inside she boiled up water on the rusty stove-top kettle and sat on the chair thinking about Chef laughing and cycling away. How could she have been so bad? It was gutting. And he was so cruel. She could make bread, for God’s sake. OK, she hadn’t baked it for years, but that wasn’t to say she couldn’t.
    Bread was the one thing her hands simply refused to make, as if the dough held too much power in its smells, its texture, its taste—just the simple process of kneading and rolling was like her own personal Pandora’s box. But she’d always been good at it. Her gran could often be heard lamenting Rachel’s refusal to make her a batch of rolls or a wholemeal. As she thought about it she wondered if Ali, with his flavour combinations, could make a decent loaf.
    Damn Chef. He must have weaknesses. No one had come into the workshop and giggled at his past failures, had they?
    She leant forward and turned on the oven, watched the flames roar to life through the glass and turned it off again. Then she found herself on her feet taking flour from the shelf, butter she’d got from the Carrefour out of the fridge and breaking eggs into a chipped mixing bowl. Before she knew it she wasflouring the worktop and kneading and stretching her dough as if she was on autopilot. Not thinking, just doing. When she looked down and saw the little round blob of dough it almost took her by surprise. She was glad to be able to leave it to prove on the table and got as far away from it as she could, going to the window to stare out at the Champs-Élysées view.
    She gazed at the perfect strands of fairy lights on the beautifully trimmed trees. It was dazzling—not a blown bulb or twig out of place. But combined with the sweet, sticky smell of raw dough in the air, it all made her suddenly feel quite homesick. Made her think of the monstrous great big tree that they hauled into the centre of Nettleton every year, branches sticking out all over the place. She’d always get needles itching down her back from helping to carry, and Jackie would