“Just brainstorming here for a few minutes to be sure we’ve got a solid plan,” he said. “We could do a Croquembouche. Kind of tie to France, where I live. Or we could do a tower of petit fours with Marry Me? written on them. I do great petit fours.” He grabbed the pen from his shirt pocket. “Or…” he sketched out a large round cake, “…frost in a quilted pattern with tiny diamonds between gold-colored piping, like engagement rings. I saw a conical layer tray in the pantry room. We could make macarons and stack them on their edges on that tray towering above the cake like a topiary. On the top, the words Will You Marry Me? Two rows—WILL YOU, over MARRY ME?—in bright-red candy glass. “

“That sounds beautiful. That’s totally it.”

“We can do two different flavor macarons. One for yes, and one for no.” He shook his head. “No. We don’t want any nos. We’ll do passion fruit macarons, strawberry for a nice red color, and good old almond, and we’ll stamp with edible ink YES on one side and I DO on the other. Hopefully we’ll have some gold back there for that. I think I saw it.”

“Good thinking. It sounds fabulous. And doable.”

“Let’s see what we can find in the pantry for the display.” After fifteen minutes of rummaging through their options, they had to nix the topiary idea. The display wasn’t sturdy enough to place on top of the cake, and attaching the Will You Marry Me? topper was going to present too many opportunities for mistakes. Instead, Andrew found a four-tier wedding cake form. He’d use the three widest layers for the custom macarons, then at the top layer he’d place the cake and cake topper.

“Can you calculate how many macarons we’ll need to make for those three layers?” he asked Victoria.

“I’m on it.”

He wrote out a list of the steps they’d need to take, in what order, with times next to them to be sure they stayed on track. This wasn’t his first rodeo. He could make anything happen as long as he had a plan.

Andrew redrew the final idea, marking the colors and tools needed for each step.

He wrote down the recipe for the cake. “We’ll use a passion fruit curd in between the layers. It’ll be bright and fresh,” he said, mostly to himself.

On a separate piece of paper, he began listing the recipe steps for the macarons. “You’ve made macarons before?”

“Every week.”

“Thank you for being my partner.”

“You have someone very special in mind as you’re making this cake, don’t you?” Victoria said.

He remembered Lori saying the cameras and mics were always on. He held back the truth. “Actually, no. I was just trying to pick something that would be both elegant and yet different.”