Punch, Pastries, and Poison by Harper Lin (ebook reader for pc and android .txt) 📕

the people sitting in the café, who were just trying to enjoy a nice cup of coffee and maybe a pastry. “I’ll get it done as fast as I can. Apologize to them for me. And make sure they all know about the party tonight.”

Once I’d come around to the idea of having the party at the café and discussed it with Matt, we both realized that we might as well make it into an open house instead of trying to pick out who we’d invite. We knew and loved almost everyone in town, so why not invite them all? We’d probably be inviting more people than not anyway. I’d had a sign up in the café for almost a week, and I’d made sure to tell the girls to mention it to anyone who came in. The more the merrier, after all. And it wasn’t about gifts either. We’d decided there wasn’t anything we needed or wanted, and we’d be much happier if the money people would have spent on a gift went to something more meaningful. The signs I’d put up around town clearly stated, “No Gifts, Please, but Donations to the Cape Bay Animal Shelter will be happily accepted at the door.” It was my way of including Latte in our celebration, since I couldn’t have him at the actual party—the health department wouldn’t have allowed it. Other than dogs, though, everyone in town was invited, and I hoped that Sammy reminding customers of that would go at least a little way in helping them to overlook the banging. The promise of pastry tended to do that for people.

Sammy nodded and left, closing the door tightly behind her for what little sound protection it would provide. It wasn’t meant for that, and I seriously doubted it would do any good, but I understood her point. Trying to be quieter wouldn’t do any good—frozen butter took a heavy hand to flatten. Besides, the last thing I wanted to do was to give the butter a chance to melt before I got it to the right size. Melted butter was death to puff pastry. All I could do was try to do it faster, so that was what I did.

When I finally got it thin enough, I grabbed the dough out of the refrigerator and laid it on the counter with the butter on top, covering the bottom two-thirds of the dough I’d already rolled out and shaped. I did a letter fold on it, bringing the unbuttered top section down over the butter then folding the bottom buttered part up on top. Now I had two layers of butter in between three layers of dough.

A good start, but two butter layers were nowhere near enough to get the delicate, flaky crust I was going for. I rotated the dough ninety degrees, rolled it back out to its original size, then did the letter fold again—top third down, bottom third up. By my estimation, that was six layers, but I still wanted more. I wrapped the dough up in plastic wrap and popped it back in the fridge to keep the butter layers nice and cold. It would need to be in there for twenty or thirty minutes before I took it back out and did two more letter folds. Then it would go back in the fridge for one more round. By the end, the dough would have nearly a thousand layers of butter that, when baked, would puff up the dough and create the flakiness I was looking for.

With plenty of time before I needed to work on the puff pastry again, I decided to get a head start on the punch. It was easy enough that it could be mixed right before party time, but I wanted to go ahead and freeze some for ice cubes. Nothing ruined a good bowl of punch like a bunch of melted ice cubes watering it down. I got everything I needed out of the refrigerator—some raspberry sorbet, pineapple, and a bottle of lemon-lime soda. Simple but delicious. Although it was counterintuitive, I had pre-thawed my frozen punch ingredients. In my opinion, it made the punch so much easier to mix evenly without odd pockets of different flavors as the frozen ingredients slowly melted.

I poured everything together into a large punch bowl and mixed it together thoroughly. Then I grabbed a ladle and poured some into a cup. It was so delicious. Fruity from the raspberries in the sorbet and light and bubbly from the soda. I’d add a dose of rum to one of the punch bowls at the party, but truth be told, it didn’t need it. It was every bit as good without alcohol as with it. I helped myself to another cup before making myself get back to work. I would have plenty of time to drink punch at the party.

I filled up every ice tray I’d been able to find between my house, Matt’s, and the café. I even had a couple that Sammy had brought in for us to use. We had a big ice machine that provided all the ice we usually used in the café, but that was hooked into the water line, just like our espresso machines were, and I didn’t think it was a good idea to try to pour punch into it. If I was lucky, we would have just had fruity ice for a while. If I was unlucky, the whole machine would probably get gummed from the sugar in the punch, and I’d have to buy a new one. It was easier to just use the few that I’d managed to scrounge up.

I covered the punch with plastic wrap and wedged it back into the fridge alongside the containers of sorbet, pineapple juice, and soda that I had ready and waiting to use for more punch. Both of our industrial-size fridges were completely packed with food for the party that night. I had no idea how many