Wish Upon a Star (47 page)

‘No, that’s true: not when I was afraid that Stella might not have one. No one understands me the way you do, Jago.’

I looked up into his warm brown eyes and then completely forgot we were surrounded by people … Our lips were closing in fast, when luckily Stella suddenly bobbed up and said excitedly, ‘Mummy! Grandma kissed Hal under the mistletoe – I saw them!’

‘Did you?’ I said, not altogether surprised.

‘She says I need to go home now, or its tears before bedtime. Can I give Daddy-Jago his present, first?’

‘Of course – I’d quite forgotten.’ I quickly delved into my shoulder bag and handed Stella a silver-tissue-covered parcel. ‘Don’t drop it.’

‘I chose this for you in Boston,’ she said, giving it to him. ‘You mustn’t drop it, either.’

‘For me?’ Jago took the parcel and unwrapped it, revealing a moulded amber glass starfish, pierced to hang in a window. ‘That is
so
beautiful – the nicest present I’ve ever had.’

Stella looked lovingly up at him. ‘It’s because you’re my starriest star of all,’ she said.

The pastry cases will be simple shortcrust – basically flour and fat with a little water to bind. The basic rule for shortcrust pastry is that you need half the weight of the flour in fat – easy to remember. You
don’t
need sugar in your pastry (I think sweetened shortcrust pastry is an abomination) because the filling will be sweet enough.

225g/8oz plain flour (but if you only have self-raising, that works)

110g/4oz butter/lard/cooking margarine

A little water

Mincemeat, bought or home-made

Icing sugar

Tepid water to mix

Glacé cherries, if liked

Preheat the oven to gas mark 6/200°C/400°F.

Grease an 18-hole tart tin, cupcake tin or similar – you will get about eighteen little tarts from this recipe, but you can reuse the same tin if you have only a smaller one.

Sieve the flour into a bowl and add the fat, using the rubbing-in method, until the mixture looks like fine breadcrumbs.

Mix in water, a tiny dribble at a time, until you can gather the pastry together with your fingers. If you overdo it slightly and it is sticky, sieve in a little more flour.

Sprinkle flour over your board and rolling pin, and then roll out the pastry quite thinly (unless you prefer thick pastry, of course).

Cut out circles just larger than your cake tin moulds. (If you haven’t got a circular cutter, I have successfully used a large teacup in the past – improvise.)

Press the pastry into the tart tin and then put about a teaspoon of mincemeat in each one. You don’t want to overfill, because you are going to ice the tops.

Bake in the middle of the oven for 20–30 minutes, until the pastry edges are just golden brown, then remove and cool on a wire rack.

Water icing is literally just icing sugar and water. You can halve some glacé cherries to decorate the tops at this stage, if you want to.

In a bowl, put four tablespoons of icing sugar. Add tepid water a teaspoon at a time until the mixture is smooth and will coat the back of a spoon.

With a teaspoon, dribble the icing onto the mincemeat in the tarts. Unless your tin has very deep moulds, you will still see some of the mincemeat peeping through, but the effect is very pretty. Decorate the top with half a glacé cherry.

Leave on the rack until the icing is cold and hard, then store in a box or tin.

A packet of trifle spongecakes (about eight fingers – or you can use up slices of leftover Madeira or sponge cake)

Raspberry or strawberry jam

Raspberry or strawberry jelly

570ml/1 pint of thick custard (you can use ready-made from a carton if you want to)

150ml/ A quarter of a pint of sherry

Edible decorations, such as silver balls and hundreds and thousands

Cream to top (see below)

Halve the sponge cakes and spread them with jam. Place in the bottom of a large glass bowl. (I have my grandmother’s wonderful Victorian cut-glass one with a gold rim, but whatever you use needs to be able to easily hold 1.2 litres/two pints of liquid.)

Make up the jelly in a jug with enough hot water to dissolve, and then top up with cold water to just under 570 ml/a pint in total. Pour over the sponge cakes in the bowl. (It should be only warm by now, but an old tip if you are pouring something hot into a glass container to avoid cracking it, is to stand a metal spoon in it first.)

Leave to set firmly overnight.

Make 570 ml/a pint of thick custard (or use ready-made) and stir into it 150 ml/a quarter of a pint of sherry. Pour it over the trifle base and leave to set. (Again, this can be overnight, if you wish. I take a leisurely approach to my trifle-making.)

At this point, some people decorate the top of the custard with blanched almonds and glacé cherries, then serve the cream in a jug separately, but I prefer to cover the top in whipped cream (or the squirty dairy cream so popular with certain characters in
Twelve Days of Christmas
).

Decorate the top with hundreds and thousands and silver balls. Keep the trifle covered and in the fridge.

Families tend to forge their own traditions and we always have profiteroles for dessert after Christmas dinner, then eat the Christmas pudding on Boxing Day. It’s surprisingly easy to make your own choux buns – and you can even pile them up to make a little croquembouche, sticking them together with melted chocolate, if you want to!

The buns can be made in advance, because they will keep for two or three days in an airtight tin, or can be frozen, though in the latter case you will need to crisp them up in the oven for a few minutes.

This should make about twenty or so little buns.

50g/2oz plain flour

Half a teaspoon caster sugar

40g/One and a half ounces of unsalted butter

100ml/Three and a half fl oz water

3 large eggs, beaten

Gather all the ingredients together and sift the sugar and flour together into a bowl.

Line two oven trays with baking paper and switch on the oven to preheat at gas mark 6/200°C/400°F.

Put the butter and water into a medium-sized pan and slowly heat until the butter has melted. Then bring to the boil.

Turn the heat right down as low as possible, then tip the flour and sugar mixture in all at once, beating vigorously until it forms a soft, smooth dough that leaves the sides of the pan clean.

Remove from the heat and leave to cool for about four minutes. Then gradually add the eggs a bit at a time (you may not need it all), whisking after each addition, until the mixture forms a ribbon off the spoon – stiff enough to hold its shape, soft enough to pipe through a tube.

Now, either take a piping bag with a medium plain tube and pipe small rounds of the mixture onto the baking trays, leaving enough room for expansion, or alternatively you can use two teaspoons to form little mounds instead, using a wet finger to smooth them.

Put in the oven for about twenty to twenty-five minutes, until the buns are puffed up and golden brown, turning the trays round halfway to ensure even cooking.

Leave the oven on, remove the trays, and pierce the end of each bun with a skewer to let the steam out. Then put back in the oven for a couple of minutes to crisp up.

Remove from the oven and place on a wire rack to cool.

Once cool, they can be stored unfilled in an airtight container for a couple of days, or frozen for later use.

Traditionally, you would pipe whipped fresh cream or patisserie cream into the buns through the hole you made to let the steam out, but you can also cut them open like an éclair and spoon the filling inside (squirty dairy cream from an aerosol also works with these, too, if you are in a hurry).

To finish, melt a little good-quality cooking chocolate and spoon over the top of each bun, allowing to harden.

Alternatively, divide into individual dishes and trickle chocolate ganache over each one before serving.

Although I mention Boston Children’s Hospital, I have never been there and have no knowledge of the staff members, so all characters and medical procedures in the book are wholly the product of my own imagination.

On the other hand, the scenes set in Honey’s Haberdashery shop were entirely based on fact, for my Grandmother, Edith Long, started up such a shop in the early years of the twentieth century, and all manner of treasure-trove came to light when it was cleared.

Read on for an exclusive extract of
Trisha’s next novel
Every Woman for Herself
,
publishing in June 2014 …

Got up at the crack of dawn to kill the Fatted Breakfast before driving Matt to the airport, only to discover that aliens had stolen my husband during the night and substituted something incomprehensibly vile in his place.

I expect their replicator was having a bad day. I distinctly remember marrying a gentle, long-haired, poetry-spouting Jason King lookalike with a social conscience, but what was facing me over the breakfast table was a truculent middle-aged businessman, paunchy, greying, and flaunting a Frank Zappa moustache edged seemingly with egg yolk: but I know better. The alien snot was the clincher.

It was not a pretty sight, but fascinating for all that.

I went and peered into the kitchen mirror to see if
I’d
changed as well: but no, I still looked like a miniature Morticia Addams.

‘Charlie,’ the Matt creature said impatiently, ‘did you hear what I said? About wanting a divorce?’

I certainly had; what did he think had ripped the veils of delusion from my eyes? But I was temporarily deprived of speech as a quarter of a century of married life flashed before my eyes in Hogarthian vignettes: Flake’s Progress.

The inner film came to a jerky halt. ‘Yes,’ I said finally, nodding. I understood.

Unfortunately my memory was not of the selective kind, a cheery sundial remembering only the happy hours, so my recollections were freely punctuated with loss. Lost mother, lost virginity, lost babies, lost husband, Lost In Space.

Charlie Rhymer, this was your life.

For some reason, Matt seemed disconcerted by my reaction. ‘We’ve grown apart since I’ve been taking these foreign contracts, and I’ve come to realise that this will be best for both of us. In fact, we can divorce right away, since we’ve been separated for more than two years.’

‘How can we be separated when you’re here?’ I asked, trying to get my head around this concept.

‘But I’m not
really
here, am I?’ he said impatiently. ‘I’m in Saudi.’

‘But you’re back for quite long holidays between contracts – and you said it would be better if
I
stayed here.’

‘You would have hated it – you know you don’t even like leaving the house, let alone the country.’

‘But that’s just York – it’s got the wrong sort of outside. I’m fine at home.’

‘
This
is your home.’

‘I meant Upvale, and Blackdog Moors.’

‘You seemed eager enough to run away from it with me.’

‘That was love, and unplanned pregnancy, and Father.’

Matt said earnestly, ‘Charlie, it isn’t that I’m not still fond of you …’

‘Oh, thanks,’ I said. ‘In fact, thank you for having me.’

He ignored that; I’m not sure he even heard it, like most of the things I say.

‘It’s just that I’m not getting anything out of this marriage,’ he continued.

‘You make me sound like a bank. What were you expecting to get out? More than you put in?’

‘At least there are no children to complicate things,’ he said, which was a very low blow. He was starting to make me feel quite sick.

‘I’m sorry it’s come to this, Charlie, but we really can’t go on. I’ve been offered a long contract in Japan, and I can’t afford to continue maintaining two households.’

‘But the house … the mortgage?’ I said, my brain starting to limp onwards a bit, now the first shockwave had broken over my head. ‘What will happen?’

‘The divorce will go through quickly if we’re both in agreement – my solicitor will send you things to sign. Then I’ll pay you maintenance every month, so you won’t have anything to worry about. The solicitor will get in touch with you and explain everything.’

‘Will he? Is that what you’ve been doing this week, organising our divorce? Why didn’t you talk to me about it, instead of suddenly handing me a
fait accompli
on your last morning home? After all, I haven’t done anything, have I?’

‘No, you haven’t done anything,’ he agreed curtly. ‘Perhaps that’s just it. I’ve moved on, and you haven’t. Other women have families and careers and interests. Perhaps now you’ve turned forty, it’s time you got out there in the real world.’

I’ve been cocooned for the twenty-three years of my married life, and now suddenly I’m to be ripped from my chrysalis and told to make like a butterfly?

He rose from the table. ‘I’ll ring you from Saudi, once you’ve had time to think it over.’

Questions were already beginning to bubble scummily to the surface, like: when did he see this solicitor? How long had he been planning this? What does he mean, he’ll give me maintenance? Was there some other woman behind this? Who on earth would want him?

‘Hurry up and get the car out,’ snapped Alien Nation in a reasonable impersonation of my husband, ‘while I get my bags.’

‘What?’

‘I’ve got a plane to catch. It’s time to go.’

It certainly was. I went into the conservatory, locking the door carefully behind me. Although it’s so tiny, once I’m in the middle where my easel and table are, you can’t see me for jungle plants.