Grid of black crown designs

The flash sheet is still taped above the proving cupboard, and Mr Achterberg has started calling it the bible. Every crown on it, sixty-odd of them, he says, is a loaf waiting to happen. Last Tuesday he made me pipe a filigree crown onto a tray of bridge rolls with a squeezy bottle of egg wash, and I got three-quarters of the way round before the oven timer went off and the dough sighed flat. He was not cross. He just looked at the half-crown for a long moment and said the ornaments were the hardest part, that a crown is only ever as good as its smallest bead.

It is ten past four now. The street is still dark except for the glow of the shop window and a fox that keeps trotting past the bins as if it has a shift to start. I have the dough for the Saturday cob under a damp cloth, and I am writing this on the back of a delivery docket because the paper in the office is all for invoices. Mr Achterberg is in the back, humming something off-key, and the radio is on low, reading out road closures.

Yesterday a woman came in asking for a crown on a cake for her father's ninetieth. She had a photo of a tiny black one she'd drawn on a napkin. I told her we could do sugar, not dough, and she said her father had been a lifelong bread man and would find it funny. He ate the first slice, she said, and then insisted on a second, which I think counts as a yes.

I'll bake you a crown when you're home. Not a good one. A lopsided one, with a bead missing where I ran out of nerve.

Love, Nell