As the autumnal hues of November fall over the Shakespearean hamlet of Ashland, Oregon, Jules and her team at Torte are working on their biggest event ever. They’ve been invited to create chocolate showpieces for the gala opening of a new exhibit, Shakespeare’s Lost Pages at SOMA. The museum, located on the campus of Southern Oregon University, is getting ready to unveil the Bard’s lost manuscript, Double Falsehood, which is being touted as the greatest artistic discovery of modern times. In addition to molding luscious, silky chocolate into magnificent structures, Torte will be serving an authentic Elizabethan feast straight from the pages of a sixteenth century cookbook featuring Lardy cakes, Frangipane tarts, and jellies with chestnut cream.
Jules has underestimated the amount of work required to pull off such a culinary feat. She finds herself in the strange position of feeling frazzled and stressed as the day of the gala approaches. However, her team rallies around her and once the massive works of chocolate art are safely installed at the museum, she can finally let out a sigh of relief and revel in the excitement of the grand celebration. But her relief is short-lived. Right before the unveiling, news quickly begins to spread that Shakespeare’s lost manuscript is missing. Not only that, but the security guard tasked with keeping the priceless artifact safe has been killed. Is this a case of a heist gone terribly wrong? Or could it be that a killer is lurking in the museum archives?
Release date:
December 28, 2021
Publisher:
St. Martin's Publishing Group
Print pages:
336
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They say that the truth rarely stays hidden, that secrets find their way to the surface even after being buried deep for years. It was a secret that nearly three years ago had launched my life in an entirely new and unexpected direction. A small stack of letters, correspondence between Carlos, my husband, and the son I didn’t know he had, had forced me to reexamine my future. Those innocuous pieces of paper and postcards had sent me packing from my life aboard the Amour of the Seas and caused me to spend the last few years learning how to let go and step into myself. If you had asked me then, I would have never imagined that there might be a way forward for Carlos and me. In hindsight I now realized that our time apart was a gift. A time for me to grow, to really get to know myself, and to unearth my own burdens.
Most of the credit for sparking my growth was due to my hometown of Ashland, Oregon. From the first moment I stepped inside the front doors of Torte, our family’s bakeshop, I knew that everything was going to be okay, regardless of how things turned out with Carlos. It was impossible to resist the welcoming charm of our Elizabethan village with its Tudor-style architecture, eclectic shops, world-class restaurants, and warm and inviting community nestled between the expansive Siskiyou Mountains in a remote corner of southern Oregon. Not a day passed when I didn’t pause for a moment of gratitude for finding my way home. It wasn’t exactly the path I had envisioned for myself, but that’s the thing about life: it’s often the twists and turns that lead us where we’re supposed to be.
The other surprising outcome had been that Carlos had ultimately decided that Ashland was where he belonged too. Our challenges had brought us closer and made our relationship that much stronger. When he showed up with his bags in tow last spring, I figured we might have a brief few weeks of bliss before we parted ways for good—him returning to the Amour of the Seas, the boutique cruise ship where we first met, and me firmly planting myself in the Rogue Valley. Fate had another idea in mind. It just took me a while to realize it.
I guess I had thought that marriage was supposed to be easy. That when Carlos and I tied the knot on a blissful sun-drenched day in Marseilles, it would be smooth sailing from then on. When things got tough, I assumed the worst. It’s one of my many faults—self-sabotage, spending too much time overthinking things. Being named Juliet Montague Capshaw may have set me up for unrealistic expectations in the romance department. I had always wondered if bearing the name of arguably the most romantic literary character of all time had destined me for heartbreak.
It turns out maybe not. Carlos was here in Ashland, and unless his acting skills were on par with the Equity actors who graced the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s stages, he appeared to be happy. Dare I say blissfully so?
We had fallen into an easy routine over the last few months. He moved into my childhood home on Mountain Avenue and began making it our own with artwork and pottery from our travels across the seas. Carlos had insisted on buying a high-end espresso machine for the kitchen and spent most of the summer (when he wasn’t tending to the vines at Uva, our winery) building an outdoor pizza oven and constructing deer-proof garden boxes for his homegrown herbs and veggies. The summer had passed in a dreamlike blur. Between running Torte and Uva, we had also opened a small outdoor ice cream shop, Scoops, that had been a major hit. June through September brought theater-lovers to Ashland, packing the house at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s many indoor and outdoor venues and filling the plaza with the constant chatter of vacationers lingering late into the evening over al fresco dinners.
My team at Torte had spent the busy months greeting everyone who walked through our doors with passion fruit curd cupcakes with mango buttercream, peach crisps with generous scoops of our hand-churned coconut concrete, and Bakewell tarts. Andy, our resident barista, had recently been crowned champion of the West Coast Barista Cup. His regional fame had made the bakeshop even more popular, as visitors wanted to taste his winning lattes and pose for selfies with him. He refused to admit it because he was humble and an all-around good guy, but I could tell the praise had brought him a new level of well-deserved confidence.
Managing our ever-growing staff and three unique properties had had me yearning for fall, the season when Ashland took on a slower pace. Just last week, the festival, affectionately known to locals as OSF, had officially gone dark for the season. Tourists returned home, props and sets were packed away, and a single bulb known as the ghost light had been illuminated, sitting center stage, warding off theater demons and darkness until the new year.
The calendar had turned to November as the sun began its winter retreat, and I found myself reflecting on how lucky I was to be living my dreams. My personal and professional lives were thriving, which often made me want to stop and pinch myself. Torte was in the midst of one of the most prestigious projects we’d ever been involved with.
A fortuitous introduction from Rosa, one of our newer team members at Torte, had put me in contact with her uncle, Javier de la Garza, the director of SOMA—the Southern Oregon Museum of Art. Javier had been working for nearly three years to bring the most coveted Shakespearean exhibit to the museum—Shakespeare’s Lost Pages.
The exhibit wasn’t simply an ode to the Bard’s collection of rare books and artifacts from his time. Of course it would include those, along with a miniature scale replica of the Globe, reproductions of Shakespeare’s chair and neck ruff, and an interactive stage with costumes and props for visitors to get a taste of what it was like to recite lines from a sonnet. But the main draw was a newly discovered manuscript, Double Falsehood, which scholars had recently confirmed was a long lost play written by William Shakespeare himself. Javier had managed to secure the first showing in the United States. Typically exhibits of this magnitude traveled to bigger West Coast markets—Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. But Javier had a trick up his sleeve in the form of the Shakespeare Festival. He had wisely leveraged the fact that OSF, one of the most prestigious repertory theaters in America, was in Ashland. There were a variety of natural tie-ins between the festival and the traveling exhibit. And there was the fact that OSF already had a broad and loyal Shakespearean fan base who were sure to make the trek to Ashland for the opening gala.
That’s where Torte came in. We would be catering the opening night gala in addition to providing desserts for a variety of smaller soirées for museum donors and patrons. When Javier had approached me in July about partnering for the event, I hadn’t realized that this project would become one of the largest, if not the largest, undertakings we’d done to date. Javier had grand visions. For the centerpiece of the dessert buffet, he wanted molded chocolate art pieces designed to resemble Shakespeare’s desk. Not just a static desk, but a functional chocolate desk with working drawers that would open and contain hidden sweet gems inside. Technically chocolate wasn’t a dessert that would have been served during Shakespeare’s time, but Javier was a chocolate fan and he was giving us creative license when it came to fudging any recipes for the sake of taste.
Initially I had resisted. While my training in culinary school included a section on chocolate, I was certainly not a trained chocolatier. I suggested some names of colleagues in Portland, but Javier wanted to keep everything about the exhibit local.
“It’s important that we support and include the community, Jules. This is not simply a SOMA event, this is an opportunity to highlight our friends and neighbors here in the Rogue Valley,” he said over coffee during our first meeting. “Rosa is my niece. I already know how talented she is, and I’ve been coming to Torte for years. It has to be you.”
“Yes, but chocolate sculpting is an art to itself,” I explained.
“I understand. That’s why I wanted to meet with you now. The gala is in mid-November, so that gives you nearly four months to prepare. I’m sure you’ll be able to create something magnificent.”
I wasn’t as convinced, but Javier was hard to turn down, and I was intrigued by the idea of being involved in such a mysterious exhibit. Ancient Shakespearean manuscripts certainly motivated me to put my chocolate skills to the test. So did the opportunity to showcase Torte amongst the dignitaries and distinguished guests coming in from all over the country. The exclusive guest list for the gala read like an invitation to the Academy Awards. How could I say no?
In hindsight, that might have been a mistake. Not that I wasn’t excited about the upcoming gala, but we had so much work left to do. Time was slipping away fast.
I had assigned Steph, one of my cake designers, the lofty task of working on the chocolate showpieces with me. She and I had been laboring over sketches for the final designs, which were much more technical than I had imagined when I agreed to take on the project. Working with chocolate at this level was a bit like constructing actual building plans. In order to hone my skills, I had dug out my old culinary school notebooks and manuals from the basement. Steph and I had watched hours of YouTube tutorials and spent a weekend in Portland with a former classmate of mine who had become a well-respected chocolatier. There were so many specifics involved with tempering chocolate in order to achieve a lush, glossy sheen, while making sure not to sacrifice flavor and constructing something solid enough that the structure wouldn’t collapse or the chocolate sag and bend.
Javier had a specific vision for the gala. He had been adamant that everything in the dessert display needed to be edible, and that the entire dinner feast must adhere to Elizabethan-era standards.
We had pored over vintage recipes. Mom would collaborate with Bethany, Torte’s personal cheerleader, social media star, and brownie baker extraordinaire, and Rosa, who worked as a floater in the bakeshop. They would be making opera cakes, frangipane tarts, jellies with chestnut cream, and frankincense and wild orange puddings to accompany the old English exhibit. Marty, a baker trained in San Francisco who had recently moved to Ashland to semi-retire, was going to oversee production of breads like lardy cake—a sweet bread filled with nutmeg, raisins, currants, and pieces of lard—and saffron cake—a spicy sugar bread loaded with assorted dried fruits and served with a side of clotted cream.
Not to be left out, Sterling, our sous chef in training with a poet’s soul and wisdom beyond his years, and Carlos, along with a couple of the SOU students who had worked at Scoops over the summer, were tackling the main feast, which would be served in the great hall. They had been learning ancient cookery techniques through a collection of Elizabethan cookbooks Javier had lent us. The menu for the feast seemed to expand every time I talked to them, but for the moment it was going to feature a beef stew, roasted game hens, fish pies, cheese and fruit platters, and trios of thick, rich sauces. As we had promised Javier, everything would be as authentic as possible, a replica of a feast fit for a queen, with a few minor modern tweaks. We had agreed that in terms of authenticity, patrons would never know about (or would be willing to look past) our use of industrial kitchen equipment. Thank goodness. I had had nightmares about having to knead that much bread dough by hand.
I had no idea how we were going to get any other baking done in the days leading up to the gala. While tourist season had ended, we still saw a steady stream of locals and visitors in town to experience the abundance of other activities Ashland had to offer, from wine tasting to mountain biking and hiking, and a bevy of winter sports.
The motivation to make sure we stayed on track forced me to tuck away my thoughts and get myself out of bed. After a hot shower and a hot cup of coffee, I left Carlos sleeping and headed outside into the dark, star-drenched southern Oregon skies. My morning walks to Torte required a flashlight. I didn’t mind. Carlos continually insisted that he would drive me to the bakeshop, but I enjoyed the quiet of a brisk walk and having the kitchen all to myself for an hour.
I breathed in the earthy scent of damp leaves as I descended the steep hillside of Mountain Avenue and made my way past the sprawling grounds of SOU. Glowing golden street lamps illuminated the pathways that cut through campus. Moonlight pooled on the red roofs of the science and humanities buildings. There was no movement in the dorms. It was much too early for college students to be awake.
I chuckled at the thought, quickened my pace, turned onto Siskiyou Boulevard, and headed straight for Torte. Even in the dark, Torte sat like a beacon with its redbrick exterior and windows that looked out onto the plaza. This morning the front windows were backlit with strings of amber twinkle lights. Leaves dangled from invisible strings as if falling from the sky. Mirror-glazed cakes in autumn maroons and burnt oranges had been arranged on tiered cake displays. I loved the bakeshop’s seasonal windows, the bright teal and red awning, and the butterflies that always fluttered in my stomach whenever it was time to launch a new day of baking.
The world was full of possibilities at this hour. I unlocked the doors and went downstairs, turning on lights as I went. My first task, after warming the ovens, was to make a pot of coffee. I knew that as soon as Andy arrived he would lure me into a second or third cup with his daily special, but I couldn’t start any bake without a steaming cup of coffee in hand. With the change in season, we had swapped out our daily roast to a Thanksgiving blend, a medium-dark roast with notes of sweet peaches and apples, a touch of malt and cocoa, and a spicy finish. The aromatic beans made me breathe deeply to inhale the heavenly scent as I added them to the grinder. Some coffee shops pre-grind their beans. Not at Torte. We grind our beans fresh every day—to order. Oxidation is the key. Every bean has unique compounds and complexity that give a coffee its aroma and flavor. In order to achieve the most delicious cup and bring out the subtle nuances in a roast, it’s imperative to keep the beans as fresh as possible, as oxidation occurs the moment the beans are ground and can quickly alter the brew.
Are we coffee snobs? In the truest definition of snobbery, I guess I would have to say yes. But only because we want to elevate the drinking experience for all of our guests. If done correctly, coffee can offer a transportive adventure for the palate. My favorite thing was to hear a customer chatting with Andy, Torte’s lead barista. He had recently dropped out of college to focus on his coffee art and roasting knowledge, but he could have taught a graduate-level course on the origins of our coffee roasts. I never got tired of eavesdropping as customers exclaimed in delight when they tasted Andy’s notes of brown sugar or a hint of smoke in their cup. He shared the espresso bar with Sequoia, who tended to push Andy out of his comfort zone. Where Andy was a traditionalist, Sequoia danced to the beat of her own drum—quite literally. I would often find her swaying to the rhythm of reggae while experimenting with hemp milk for lattes. As of late, our regulars were raving about her fall Hippie Juice, a cinnamon apple cider sangria that was a happy hour hit.
While the coffee brewed and filled the kitchen with its intoxicating fragrance, I lit the wood-fired oven and reviewed our schedule for the day. Since Scoops was closed for the season and Uva had limited winter hours, I didn’t have to worry about staffing for either location. However, we did have a number of custom cake orders, as well as bread deliveries and a list of pastries to stock the store’s pastry case.
I poured myself a cup of the rich roast, allowing the fall fruit flavor to linger on my tongue. Coffee is an experience meant to be savored, in my humble opinion. It should be revered, sipped slowly, and allowed to linger on the palate in order for each unique flavor to come forward.
Before Steph and I attempted a mock-up of one of the chocolate pieces, I wanted to get a head start on baking, so I tied on a candy-apple-red apron with our blue fleur-de-lis logo. I knew one of the pastries I wanted to share with our customers today—apple cream cheese bars.
I started with the crust by pulsing graham crackers in a blender until they were finely ground, resembling sand. Then I mixed the crumbs with melted butter, brown sugar, and a healthy dose of cinnamon. I pressed the mixture into large baking tins and set them aside while I creamed together butter, sugar, vanilla, cream cheese, and eggs. Once the batter was smooth and silky, I added in fall spices—cinnamon, nutmeg, and a touch of cloves. I spread that evenly over the graham cracker crust and put the tins in the oven to bake. I wanted to top the bars with a fresh apple compote. A friend had dropped off the last of her apple harvest from her organic farm. I intended to use some to make batches of our signature apple butter. The rest could go in my compote.
I washed, peeled, and cored the pale red Honeycrisp apples. Then I diced them and tossed them in fresh lemon juice to keep them from browning. I sautéed the apples in a little butter before covering them with orange juice, brown sugar, and nutmeg. I would let them simmer for ten to fifteen minutes until the juices thickened and the apples were tender.
As I pulled the first trays of cheesecake bars from the oven, Andy came through the basement entrance.
“Morning, boss. It’s getting cold out there.” He hung a puffy ski jacket with dozens of faded lift tickets clinging to the zipper on the coatrack. “You know what that means? Snow’s coming.” He rubbed his hands together with enough friction to start a fire. “This is the time of year that I start praying to the snow gods every night. I have to tell you that I have a good feeling they’re on my side this year.”
I chuckled. “Isn’t it a little early for ski season? It’s only the beginning of November.” While it was true that Ashland was situated at elevation at the edge of the Siskiyou Mountains, snowfall wasn’t a sure thing in town, especially in November.
“Nah, it’s never too early for snow.” He came into the kitchen and grabbed a red Torte apron. His youthful cheeks were the same shade of red from the cold outside, and his eyes were bright. “You never know. Remember last year we had that massive Indigenous Peoples’ Day storm? It dumped a ton of snow on Mount A. I’m hoping for a repeat.”
“I won’t complain. I love the snow too, but maybe it could hold off until after our gala event.”
Andy twisted his lips into a half scowl. “Okay, I guess I can give you a week or two before I start doing my snow dance in the streets.” He glanced at the bars. “What’s the special today?”
“Apple cheesecake bars.”
“Hmmm. I was contemplating a fall drink on my way in this morning. That gives me inspiration. I’ll go get the espresso machine fired up and see what I can come up with.”
“Sounds good.” I took the second round of cheesecake bars from the oven. They would need to cool before I layered on the compote and my final touch—a crumb topping. For that I sliced chunks of cold butter and forked in brown sugar, oats, pecans, cinnamon, and salt. Texture is as important as flavor when it comes to pastry, and the crisp buttery crust, smooth cream cheese filling, tangy soft apples, and crunchy topping would provide a symphony of textures in every bite.
The kitchen began to fill with delicious aromas as the rest of the team arrived. My brief moment of quiet quickly transformed into a frenzy of bodies stirring vats of soup, kneading bread dough, and running up and down the stairs to stock the pastry case. Within the hour, we were gathered around the island tasting my apple cheesecake bars, which had turned out even better than I expected. To go with the bars, Andy created an amaretto clove latte that we all agreed outshone any chain coffee shop’s chemical-style pumpkin latte.
As much as I enjoyed savoring my coffee in an empty kitchen for the first hour, I loved this even more. A buzzing kitchen was a happy kitchen, and even with days of hard labor and preparation ahead, there was nothing I enjoyed more than being surrounded by my creative and energetic staff. Watching them immediately spring into action without prompting reassured me that we could handle anything that came our way.
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