They were golden brown, puffed up high, and beautiful. Hannah went off to call Lisa to take a look. Several people stopped her to chat, and at least ten minutes passed before she switched aprons with Lisa and sent her partner off to the kitchen to take a look.

Lisa was back almost immediately, but she didn’t look happy. She was shaking her head slightly as she approached the counter to take back her apron.

“What’s wrong?” Hannah asked her.

“I’m not sure, but I think you’d better go look for yourself. Maybe Mom left something out of the recipe.”

When Hannah pushed through the swinging door to the kitchen, she saw why Lisa had looked unhappy. The cream puffs weren’t puffed any longer. They’d collapsed and now they resembled…she didn’t really want to think about what they resembled, but she’d stepped over a few the last time she’d walked through a cow pasture.

When something didn’t work, she wanted to know why. Hannah broke one puff open and stared at the wet strands of dough inside. Steam was the culprit and she knew what to do about that. It was the final step in Bernadette’s Popover recipe. She should have released the steam by poking the puffs with the tip of a sharp knife right after she’d taken them out of the oven.

While she was at it, there was another change she could make in Lisa’s mother’s recipe. Hannah picked up a pen and wrote in an additional ingredient. She’d add a little safeguard to help with the rising and stabilize the puffs. Baking powder should do it.

Tasting was next. Hannah broke off a little piece of puff and sampled it. She could taste the egg, and the dough was slightly salty, but that was about it. Perhaps real cream puff aficionados wanted a perfectly bland puff to show off their fillings, but Hannah didn’t see why the outside shouldn’t taste as good as the inside. A little sweetness would help, and there was no sugar in Emmy Herman’s recipe.

Since she didn’t think it would disturb the balance of wet and dry to add a bit of sugar, Hannah wrote in a second ingredient, a tablespoon of white granulated sugar. She was about to add some cinnamon or nutmeg, but she reconsidered. The puffs would have various flavors of fillings. Not all of those fillings would be enhanced by her choice of spices.

Hannah spent the next hour making another batch of cream puffs from her revised recipe. She pierced the side of each puff when they came out of the oven, placed them on a cooling rack away from any drafts, and sat at the stainless steel workstation, sipping a cup of coffee and waiting to see if disaster would strike twice.