CHAPTER 1
“Stop that!” I yelled at the house. “I’ll never learn to bake if I can’t practise.” I pulled the cupcakes out of the oven and admired them. They were my best effort yet, only blackened on the bottom and up the sides. The sunken bit in the middle wasn’t burned at all. I beamed.
The house made a grumbling sound.
“Turn the electricity back on now. Please,” I added. I emptied the cupcakes onto a cooling rack. The cooling rack instantly broke.
The sprinkler system came on, drenching me and my cupcakes. “There was no fire this time!” I shouted. I didn’t even know that the house had a sprinkler system. The house had been annoying lately. It had stopped watching Mixed Martial Arts and now only wanted me to watch baking shows.
No matter how much I tried, I was still having trouble coming to terms with the fact I had inherited a house with its own personality, a house which could change its rooms, turn on the TV, and terrify criminals by showing them the illusion that the walls were closing in on them. Still, that was no stranger than having to come to terms with the fact that I was a witch, a real live witch. When I found I had inherited the house and the cupcake store from my estranged Aunt Angelica, I had never imagined the strange things that were in store for me.
By the time I’d cleaned the kitchen, taken a shower, and was nicely dry, I had to tackle the problem of the cake. Camino, my elderly next-door neighbour and fellow witch, was having a Cluedo party that night and had asked everyone to bring a plate. The only trouble was that she expected something to be on the plate. And the way it was looking, my only hope was a No Bake Cake.
To my delight, the first recipe I found in my googling was a No Bake Fridge Cake. It looked simple enough, having only three ingredients. I simply had to soak chocolate chip cookies in sherry, cover them with whipped cream, line them up side by side on a plate, cover the entire thing with cream, and refrigerate for a couple hours.
What could go wrong?
I whipped the cream, remembering that Thyme, my best friend and also my employee at the cake store I had inherited from my aunt, had warned me not to whip cream too hard or it would turn to butter. I kept whipping. It hadn’t turned yellow yet, so that was a good sign.
I had abundant packets of chocolate chip cookies, so I opened one and put it on the countertop next to the bowl that was ready for me to pour in the sherry. I was a wine drinker, but I was pretty sure I had seen sherry in the pantry. I couldn’t find any, but there was a bottle of vodka left by Aunt Angelica. I’d never touched the stuff, but I figured it would make a good substitute. I read the label: ‘192-proof (96% alcohol).’ I shrugged. That didn’t mean anything to me. After all, I was a light wine drinker. It would have to do.
I soaked the chocolate chip cookies one by one in the vodka until they were about to dissolve, and then carefully moved them to the long, narrow plate where I coated them with whipped cream. I stood back to admire my handiwork. It had gone so well that I figured I should make two more cakes just like the first. After all, Camino had told me that the other witches—Thyme, Ruprecht and his granddaughter Mint—were coming, and also two of Camino’s friends. I wanted to make a good impression.
