Wish Upon a Star. Trisha Ashley

      ‘Yes, I’m writing an article on the differences between the traditional Eccles cake, Chorley cakes and Sad cakes for my next “Cake Diaries”,’ I explained, ‘and I thought perhaps you could tell me which you prefer?’

      ‘Oooh, lovely, a taste test,’ said a tall, attractive dark girl who I think was called Zoë … or maybe her friend was called Zoë and she was called Rachel? It was one way or the other.

      ‘I did mention that Cally is a well-known cookery writer, didn’t I? She writes the “Tea & Cake” page in Sweet Home magazine, and “The Cake Diaries” for a Sunday supplement,’ Chloe said, and several of them said they got the magazine, even if they hadn’t seen my pieces in the Sunday paper.

      A tall, grim and alarmingly Mrs Danvers figure in a black apron brought in a tray of coffee to have with my cakes, and left without saying anything, her rat-trap mouth firmly shut, though I heard Chloe thank her and call her Maria, so she must be some kind of housekeeper.

      Once everyone was munching on Eccles cakes the conversation turned to nice local places to visit with children and they told me about the new nature reserve that had been created on the site of a former mill, and how the Victorian mill manager’s house was being turned into a museum.

      ‘Oh, yes, the vicar mentioned that when he was telling me about how everyone in the village always came together to fight for a good cause,’ I recalled.

      ‘They were going to build a retail park on the site, but we were all against that, so in the end it was sold to a charity, Force for Nature. Luckily there was a huge anonymous donation, so already they’ve put up an eco-friendly wooden café and information centre and boardwalks around the site,’ Poppy said.

      ‘Now they’re starting to convert the mill owner’s house to how it would have been in Victorian times,’ Chloe put in. ‘There’s a courtyard with some outbuildings at the back, where I think they might have a couple of craft workshops eventually, or something like that.’

      ‘I’ll have to take Stella out there; it sounds lovely,’ I said.

      ‘We have an annual teddy bears’ picnic, and we’ve decided to have that there this year,’ the tall, dark girl said, then nudged her friend. ‘Rachel, Betty Boo’s put an entire Duplo figure in her mouth.’

      ‘She’s got a mouth like a letterbox, that child,’ Rachel said with a long-suffering sigh, going over and casually hooking it out again. ‘She doesn’t get it from me.’

      Betty Boo roared loudly for five minutes, then stopped suddenly and crawled off towards something else. I hoped it was larger than the plastic figure.

      Stella tired after a bit and came and sat quietly on my lap, thumb in mouth, so I carried her home, glad I’d taken the car because of carrying the cake boxes. They were now much lighter, containing only the odd crumb.

      ‘Did you enjoy that?’ I asked her.

      She nodded. ‘I liked all the toys, especially the pink castle. Could I have one of those, Mummy?’

      ‘Do you want a Barbie doll to go with it?’ I asked cautiously, because she’d never shown any interest in dolls to date, and I’d hoped if she was going to start, it wouldn’t be with something so strangely mutant-looking and unnatural, so it was a relief when she shook her head so the fine silvery-gold curls danced.

      ‘No, I want it for all my families,’ she explained.

      ‘It’s pretty big, so you could certainly fit them all in. Do you want it more than that tree house we saw?’ I asked. ‘Or the camper van?’

      She pondered. ‘Not more …’ she said finally. ‘The same.’

      ‘You could ask Santa if he’d bring you one, when we get a bit nearer to Christmas,’ I suggested. ‘I expect he’ll feel you deserve a big present after we’ve been to America to get you made better, so you never know.’

      I emailed Jago when I got home and told him the verdict on the cakes: Eccles cake was definitely favourite, Chorley cake was all right, but Sad cake was a bit more shortcakey, so that fingers of it would go well for elevenses with a cup of coffee. That could be my next recipe on the ‘Tea & Cake’ agenda – more crossover of my two different regular columns.

      He emailed back and said maybe biscuits like garibaldi would make a good follow-up article, because it was only one step from an Eccles cake to a garibaldi really, when you thought about it.

      That was a great idea! It’s so wonderful having someone on the same wavelength that I can bounce baking ideas off, because it’s clearly going to spark all kinds of useful things.

      Celia came over on the Wednesday for another fundraising discussion, though without Will, since he had to deliver one of his larger sculptures, a group of driftwood birds on a sea-smoothed log, to a customer.

      Stella was in her room with the door open so I could see her playing on the carpet with her fuzzy ginger cat family and I could just hear the murmur of her voice as she talked to them, too. She looked up long enough to wave at Celia, before vanishing back into her game.

      She kept an eye on Stella while I went to make coffee and fetch in some Sad cake, which I’d made into bar shapes this time, rather than rounds. ‘See what you think of these.’

      ‘Are they fattening?’ she asked, picking one up.

      ‘Yes, very.’

      ‘Good,’ she said, taking a great bite before unrolling her ideas.

      The Crafty Celia circles had taken the fundraising bit between their teeth and were planning all kinds of events. They were all up for a sponsored Knitathon, to start off with, producing as many squares of an afghan blanket as possible in a day.

      ‘That sounds like a lot of knitting.’

      ‘It’s going to be crochet really, only “Crochetathon” didn’t really sound right. Afterwards we’ll sew all the squares into blankets and sell them to raise money, too,’ she explained. ‘Then we’ll have a selling exhibition of craftwork in the coach house in summer, maybe combined with a garden party. We could lure people in with the promise of coffee and cakes, with entrance to the exhibition included in the admission charge.’

      ‘I could make the cakes for that,’ I said. ‘Oh, Celia, you and Will have already done so much more than all the rest of my friends put together.’

      ‘Will says if you have a fundraising auction, you can have one of his bird sculptures as a lot.’

      ‘He is so kind. Chloe Lyon said the vicar had some ideas and was coming to see me again to discuss them,’ I said. ‘She’s the vicar’s wife, did I say? It’s very odd, because her grandfather is a self-professed warlock and runs the Museum of Witchcraft.’

      ‘Really? It seems a rather odd village altogether,’ Celia said. She’d usually come over to visit me when I’d been up here staying with Ma, and so had got to know it a bit.

      ‘It is – but in a good way. Everyone has been very nice to me, considering how Ma has always kept to herself, though that seems to have been an Almond family habit, so I expect they’re used to it.’

      ‘From what you’ve told me, the Almonds all sounded a bit Cold Comfort Farm,’ she said frankly.

      ‘Yes, and I think they had their own version of “something nasty in the woodshed” too, that they didn’t talk about, but no one will tell me what it is. Mind you, it must have been so long ago that not many people know what it was, anyway.’

      ‘Martha seems to be getting about a bit more than she used to, though, from the sound of it,’ Celia said.

      I considered it. ‘She is a bit, though even now she rarely goes into the village for shopping. However, she does like the bookshop, Marked Pages, and she’ll go in the Spar if she’s run out of anything vital, like tea or whisky. You know,