Peach Cobbler Murder by Joanne Fluke Page B

unmold them, and frost the resulting layered domes with whipped cream.
    The official wedding cake, the one that would appear in the photographs, was being created by Sue Ganske, Lisa’s cousin twice removed. Since everyone on Lisa’s mother’s side was Norwegian, it would be a towering, twenty-layer Kransekake, the traditional wedding cake of Norway. As Sue had warned, when she phoned The Cookie Jar with her offer to bake the wedding cake, “You’d better plan on having another cake to serve. Kransekake is a sculpture dessert like the French Croquembouche . It’s so beautiful, nobody wants to eat it.”
    Hannah could understand that. She’d seen Croquembouche, the French dessert made with miniature cream puffs coated with caramel syrup and arranged in a pyramid. Usually displayed on a fancy serving plate, it was drizzled with more caramel syrup spun out into golden threads and then dusted with powered sugar. The elaborate dessert had been displayed at a formal catered dinner Hannah had attended while she was in college. It had looked scrumptious, but none of the guests had tasted it. The Croquembouche had made it through the entire party intact, since no one had wanted to be the first to break off a piece.
    That college party had taught Hannah an important lesson, and it was the reason the meringues on her pies weren’t absolutely symmetrical, and her cookies were usually slightly irregular. When a dessert crossed the line from pretty to a flawless masterpiece, people were afraid to touch it. Hannah had no doubt that the same Croquembouche was still making the rounds of the formal college parties, and if anyone ever worked up the nerve to take a taste of the petrified pastry, they’d need extensive dental work.
    â€œI’ll be back by three at the latest,” Hannah announced to the cat whose head was buried up to his ears in his food bowl. “I have to get dressed for the wedding. You won’t mind eating dinner that early, will you?”
    Moishe’s head snapped up and he stared at her with an expression Hannah interpreted to mean, Are you kidding? I’ll eat any time you feed me. And speaking of food, why don’t you fill up this bowl before you leave?
    â€œOkay, okay.” Hannah unlocked the broom closet door and filled his bowl with kitty crunchies. Then she tossed him a salmon-flavored treat shaped like a fish, relocked the door, and shrugged into the long green parka coat Andrea and her mother had given her for Christmas. Once that was zipped up, Hannah clamped a matching knit cap on her head, pulled it down to cover her ears, retrieved her car keys from the saddlebag purse she then slung over her shoulder, and pulled on her fur-lined gloves. Although this whole process had taken less than three minutes, she was already overheated inside the quilted parka, and it was a relief to step out the door and into the sub-zero freezer that Minnesota provided for its residents free of charge during the winter.
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    The first thing Hannah did when she got out of her car in the parking lot at The Cookie Jar was to unwind the extension cord that was wrapped around her front bumper. One end of the cord was attached to the head-bolt heater that was installed under the hood of her cookie truck. She plugged the other end into the strip of outlets on the outside of her building and mentally congratulated herself for remembering. She’d caught the tail end of the weather on KCOW radio during her trip to town. The current temperature was minus eighteen degrees and the predicted high for the day wasn’t expected to reach the zero mark.
    It took Hannah several tries to get her key in the lock, but she didn’t take off her gloves. Her palms were sweating a bit inside the fur lining and she knew how painful it could be to grasp the metal knob with a moist hand. The moisture would freeze almost instantly upon coming into contact with the cold metal. Then, when Hannah