“I know, but I also couldn’t risk doing something”—Rosaline tried to strike a balance between I’m taking on feedback and I’m being passive-aggressive—“joyless.”

Marianne Wolvercote arched a single cold eyebrow. “Very wise.”

“So what have you got in store for us?” asked Wilfred Honey.

“Well, I’m doing a simple three-layered chocolate cake with a Swiss meringue buttercream, but the icing is going to have a sort of dark-blue marbled space effect, and I’m going to make macaron planets, and then dust the whole thing with edible glitter so it looks all starry.”

Wilfred Honey nodded approvingly. “That sounds very nice, pet.”

“And of course,” Marianne Wolvercote added, in that tone that made it weirdly hard to tell approval from contempt, “marbled buttercream is very in right now.”

“Yep, that’s me.” Rosaline gave a kind of awkward thumbs-up. “Totally on fleek. Um, I meant that ironically. People are going to know I meant that ironically, right?”

Wilfred Honey now just looked confused. “What’s a fleek?”

“Nobody knows, darling,” drawled out Grace Forsythe. “It’s the Voynich manuscript of the modern age.”

“I’m not sure I know what that is either,” Wilfred Honey admitted.

Grace Forsythe got that I went to Cambridge, darling look on her face. “Neither does anybody else. That was rather the joke.”

“Well”—Wilfred Honey got that I’m from Yorkshire, don’t fuck with me look on his face—“my mam always said that if you’d have to explain it to the milkman, it’s not funny.”

Still bickering, the party moved on, leaving Rosaline to finish her sponge. The atmosphere in the ballroom was pretty tense, but she couldn’t tell if it was because it was a big challenge or because they were so close to the semifinal or because sixty percent of the competitors had spent their morning being chewed out by the producer for holding an imaginary goat orgy.

“I think,” Alain was saying from his workstation, “that this is going to come down to flavours. I’m guessing most people will do chocolate or vanilla, so I’m hoping I’ll stand out because the whole thing is shot through with a hint of matcha. So it’s a matcha green tea sponge with a matcha buttercream . . .”

Grace Forsythe leaned in before he could continue. “Are you not afraid that might be . . . a little too matcha?”

“Well, I don’t think so. It’s quite a complex ingredient. My feeling is that using it in different ways will bring different elements of the flavour out.”

Grace Forsythe patted him on the shoulder. “Too matcha information, old boy.”

Rosaline didn’t look up again until her layers were in the oven—everyone was pretty much at the same stage she was, apart from Nora, who seemed to have made three gigantic macarons; and Anvita, whose bench was covered in sandwich tins, mixing bowls, and layer after layer of as yet unovened cake.

“This is fine,” she was telling Colin Thrimp. “I know exactly what I’m doing. When it all comes together it’s going to—” Her elbow caught a mixing bowl, sending a spray of bright green buttercream up her apron and across the floor. “Still fine. I’ve got plenty.”

Colin put a hand to his headset. “Did we get that? Fabulous. Quick close-up of the spill, then get technical to deal with the slip hazard.”

Sensing she had about a three-minute window before she had to start on her macaron, Rosaline nipped over to Anvita’s workstation. “Are you . . . sure you’re okay?”

“Definitely,” she said, in a definitely-not voice. “This is all part of the plan. I just need to bake . . . um . . . seven more layers, two at a time, for about forty minutes each.”

“That’s three hours twenty minutes, just on the cakes.”

“Yep. Yep. Worked that out. As long as I do the macaron quickly, and perfectly, while batches two and three are in the oven, then I’ll have time to cool, ice, and decorate everything with”—absently, Anvita tasted the buttercream from her apron—“about thirty seconds to spare.”

This was exactly the sort of thing that Alain had told Rosaline not to do. And she went ahead and did it anyway. “Do you want to use my oven? I need a shelf for my third layer, but you can have the other one.”

Desperate hope flashed in Anvita’s eyes. “Really? Is that allowed?”

They both glanced towards Colin. “Oh no, it’s wonderful. Jennifer says the US market loves to see British people being hopelessly noncompetitive.”

“Anyone got a spare oven shelf?” Rosaline called out. “Anvita’s decided to do all the cake.”

Alain seemed absorbed in his matcha buttercream and didn’t even look up.

“Yeah, all right,” said Harry. “You can have mine in about twenty minutes.”

Nora, still waiting for her giant macaron to dry, was perched on her stool, slyly reading a book that appeared to be called The Playboy Prince’s Secret Baby. “You can have mine now,” she offered. “I think I’ll need it again in about an hour.”

Only slightly hindered by the camera crew, and Colin Thrimp’s multiple requests for retakes, Harry, Rosaline, and Anvita dispersed Anvita’s many layers across the ballroom. And then Rosaline got back to her macarons. Operation Stop Anvita Imploding had taken slightly more time than she’d budgeted for, but—to quote Anvita herself—it was fine. It was fine.

And it was, as it happened, mostly fine. The cake came together nicely and the marbling pretty much worked—although she’d been a little too heavy-handed with the black colouring so it was quite a dark night sky in the end. Her iridescent macaron planets, though, she was genuinely proud of. At one point, she’d been planning to do them to appropriate scale with an enormous Jupiter and a tiny Mercury, but when she’d tried it at home they’d cooked at different rates so while Earth had been about right, Saturn had been mush and Pluto was basically a bullet. Although that probably served it right for not being technically a planet. Rosaline was adding the popping-candy asteroid belt when she heard a despairing wail from Anvita’s direction.

Her cake, which about three seconds ago had been a baroque masterpiece in jewel tones, with a trail of macarons spiralling around it like a feather boa on a particularly delicious drag queen, was now listing heavily as both Anvita and Grace Forsythe did their best to support it without ending up elbow-deep in sponge and icing.