The Cake On Fire
The rain-slicked Pest embankment at 10:23 PM, where 52 wedding rehearsal guests are huddled under a scaffolding canopy outside a closed pastry shop and the rescued barge is listing quietly against a bollard twenty feet away.
The barge made it to shore, but the diesel engine coughed its last breath docking and belched a plume of black smoke directly into the five-tier rehearsal cake, which is now structurally intact but coated in a film of engine soot and smells like a bus depot. Katla hasn't seen it yet — she's three glasses of pálinka deep and slow-dancing with her fiancé on the wet cobblestones — but the pastry chef, a very serious Hungarian woman named Erzsébet, is standing over her creation with tears running silently down her face and a blowtorch in one hand. Erzsébet says she can caramelize a sugar shell over the entire exterior in six minutes, sealing the soot underneath a glossy amber coat that will taste like crème brûlée, but she needs someone to hold each tier steady on the tilting barge deck while she torches it. Double wants to get back on the listing barge and hold the tiers for Erzsébet because Katla deserves a cake that isn't a war crime. Bust wants to walk four blocks to the 24-hour Spar, buy every package of Túró Rudi chocolate bars they have, stack them into a tower, and tell Katla it's a 'Hungarian tradition.'
“I just fixed a boat engine with a corkscrew — you think I can't hold a cake still for six minutes? Erzsébet has a BLOWTORCH. We're doing this.”
“You want to reboard the sinking boat to let a crying woman point a blowtorch at you while you cradle five tiers of diesel cake — and I'M the one who needs to explain the alternative?”
Erzsébet torched all five tiers in five minutes and forty-one seconds while Double held each one steady on the listing deck, only losing his footing once — which actually saved the fourth tier from a rogue wave that splashed over the gunwale and hit him square in the back instead. The finished cake gleamed like a Hungarian amber jewel under the scaffold lights, and Katla ugly-cried into her pálinka when she saw it, never once noticing the faint diesel aftertaste because Erzsébet had spiked the caramel with barack brandy.
I'm standing in a Spar at midnight holding forty-six Túró Rudis and I can hear the applause from here. I'm buying them anyway.
I told you — blowtorch plus boat plus crying pastry chef equals MAGIC. That's just math.