Read Online How to Eat a Cupcake by Meg Donohue - Free Book Online

neck, immediately strode through the swinging door into the café and returned to hand out three steaming mugs of coffee. She stood, stout and serious, studying the prep list and taking admirably large gulps of the scalding hot coffee, before tackling the first duties of her day: mixing muffin batter and preparing pastry fillings. As Lorena switched on the stand mixer, Carlos dove into the Sisyphean task of scrubbing the mountain of crusted trays, tins, and bowls that had already stacked up in the sink. Lorena, Carlos, and I formed just the latest of a string of close-working kitchen teams I’d been a member of over the years, but we were more well-oiled than most, having been together long enough to iron out some of the kinks that come with working ungodly hours in tight quarters. But really, even the smallest, hottest, most adversarial kitchens in which I’d worked over the years—where Spanish bounced rapid-fire off the appliances—inevitably came to feel like some strange version of home. Eventually, though, someone always moved on—to a better gig, another kitchen, or a new city. This time, I realized with a pang, that someone would be me. I just hoped Ernesto, the owner of the bakery, would promote Lorena to head baker. She’d been working in kitchens for thirty years, and what she lacked in creativity she made up for in diligence and dependability. As tempted as I was to poach her for the cupcakery, I didn’t have the heart to leave Ernesto and take his best assistant baker, too.
    At six thirty I heard the jingle of keys in the café’s front door, and a moment later Ernesto himself popped his head into the kitchen.
    â€œMorning all,” he trilled. Ernesto was a triller, the kind of man who was as chipper at six thirty in the morning as he would be when he locked up at ten that night.
    â€œBanana-chocolate,” I said, passing him a tray of perfectly golden muffins.
    He faked a swoon against the door frame. “These are going on the top shelf. Ay, the aroma! The customers won’t stand a chance.”
    â€œAs long as you save them some.” Ernesto’s habit of “sampling” the goods sometimes made me feel more like his personal chef than his head baker.
    â€œHow can I serve something I haven’t tried myself?” Ernesto called from the front room. I could hear him sliding the display case open. “It would be . . . what’s the word? Unethical. And, you know, cruel. To me. Smelling these gorgeous little darlings all day long without being able to taste them. Cruel and unusual. Torture!”
    I rolled my eyes, but couldn’t help feeling pleased. I had to admit it was nice to have a boss who loved what I made. Over the years, I’d had every type of boss out there—the one who thought I used too much butter, the one who thought I used too little, the hairy one who was always trying to make out with me in the freezer, the one who never once in the two years I worked for her tasted a single one of my recipes, but fired me the day I asked for a raise. And now here I was, working for my dream boss, a boss who gave me free rein in the kitchen and had clearly formed an unhealthy, if flattering, addiction to the pastries I created, and I was going to quit? For the first time since college, I was in a place where I was one hundred percent sure that I would be able to pay my rent the next month—and even the month after that!—and I was about to throw all of that security away. I pressed my fingers into my temples to ward off the impending headache.
    Still, Becca’s words circled back through my thoughts, a not-so-gentle reprimand. Since when had I become such a slave to security? Since when had my dream to be my own boss morphed into merely working for my dream boss? Sure, the route I was headed down meant I was going to have to work with Julia, but wouldn’t the end result of owning my own bakery make the hassle of