Nobody Wants To Be A Ghost Forever

Before Vera became a baker she was a pharmacist and It is this scientific approach and attention to detail that she brings to baking that make her cakes so perfect, so wonderful.

Well that’s what the publicist had written for the blub on the back cover of Vera Foley’s best selling book, and that much was true. No Vera Foley recipe was ever as vague as to have in its list of ingredients 2 large Eggs. No, to create a Vera Foley cake eggs had to be cracked and then their contents weighed. Foley Cake Number 43, contained 3.84 ounces of egg. Foley devotees might crack open and weigh a dozen individual eggs in the search for the perfect weight. The focus on precision was not limited eggs however, one recipe demanded 15.32 Saffron flowers, another 123 flakes of Himalayan Pink Salt and another 84 drips of Cretan Thyme Honey. This accuracy was essential, Vera claimed, to ensure the correct proportions for the creation of a perfect cake. Baking was a science, she said, get the elements wrong and the results will be unpredictable.

In the two years since the launch of the first recipe book Vera Foley had acquired a cult like following of millions, she had her own tv series and a very profitable line of cookware which, not surprisingly, included many specialised and expensive measuring devices.

By any measure Vera Foley was hugely successful, she was smart, beautiful and an entrepreneurial wizard. She led a charmed existence, or so it seemed. But that was the thing, Vera Foley did not actually exist. She had been created by a team at the publishing house who were tired of paying huge advances to celebrity chefs who did nothing for their fee and whose recipes were all created by someone else. This was the reality of their world. In the same way that celebrity autobiographies were really written by Ghost Writers, and the recipes in celebrity chef’s books were created by Ghost Cooks, Vera Foley's cakes were created by a Ghost Baker.

The team that created Vera had never expected her to be the runaway success she had become and that success had brought its own problems. Last year they had got to the point where Vera Foley could no longer remain anonymous. The Ghost Baker behind the exquisite cakes that had made Vera a phenomenon was the neighbour of one of the team that created her, Marketing VP Kevin Rowland. Kevin’s neighbour was called Carolyn Monroe and, although her name was almost the same as one of the most memorable movie goddesses ever, she was completely forgettable except that is for her astounding talent as a baker of cakes.

Carolyn was in love with Kevin and had spent many days fantasising about their life together as she beat eggs and folded in flour. One day she had persuaded Kevin to try a piece of her chocolate cake and that was it, Kevin fell head over heels in love at first bite. Sadly though for Carolyn it was her baking that had captured his heart and not her and the next day at work he got together his team and created Vera Foley.

Carolyn knew that, although her cakes were stellar, she would never be a star herself, but she didn’t care, the publishers paid her well and it meant she worked closely with Kevin. Things would have been fine but the book’s growing success meant that the demand for a flesh and bone Vera Foley, scientist and baker, became too strong and Kevin and his team decided to hire an actress to be the face of their creation. She was at first upset by the move. The idea that another person would gather the praise for her creations upset her, but Kevin sold her the idea. He convinced her that the fame and constant attention it would bring would destroy the simple life she loved and make her a target for rivals out to steal her secrets and smear her reputation. However, it was his claim that it would be hard for them to keep working together once her secret was out that finally tipped the scales and she agreed that hiring an actress was the best option.

A month later, an unknown actor, who had never been cast in anything before, became Vera Foley. She was five-ten, blonde, beautiful and surprisingly slender for someone who supposedly spent their time baking cakes. But the world did not care about such details and loved her as much as the cakes. From magazine covers her smiling face gazed out from racks at supermarkets checkouts. She attended book signings, gave interviews and offered her thoughts on everything from climate change to the existence of alien life on earth. She was after all a scientist.

The actor, formerly known as Heather Gill, knew she’d never have another role like this and she gave it her all and over time she came to believe she was Vera Foley. But actors still need to remember they are just acting. Heather Gill was not Vera Foley, she was not a pharmacist and she was not a baker and, more importantly for Carolyn Monroe, she was not supposed to be Kevin Rowland’s girlfriend.

One morning after she’d bumped into her leaving Kevin’s flat at 8am she decided this could go on no longer. That the world needed to know that Vera Foley was a fraud and that they’d been had. But how to do this without ruining things that she still hoped would happen for her and Kevin? That night she sat down and made a plan to send the world a message in a cake.

All through the nights and days in the run up to Vera’s Foley’s next tv show Carolyn endlessly measured and mixed and folded and whipped and baked and baked again until finally, she had created another perfect cake.

Then carefully placing the cake in a box she delivered it to the studio where Vera was recording. Taped to the outside of the box was an envelope that contained the information on the cake that the writers needed and a set of instructions on how it should be shared with Vera’s celebrity studio guests. Kevin, now the show’s executive producer ensured that these instructions were always followed carefully, he was under no illusions over who the real baker was and, as Vera Foley handed each of her guests a mouth-watering looking slice of chocolate cake, she followed the autocue script and announced, This cake says more about me than anything else I have ever baked. As her guests bit into its fluffy perfection she added, I call it Milli Vanilla.

But as the cake melted in their mouths the guests appeared confused, the texture was perfect, but where was the intense chocolate hit? It just tasted of vanilla?

Now Carolyn’s cakey secret message might have gone undetected but lucky for her one of the show’s regular viewers was Simon Kapalski, one time Rolling Stone contributing journalist but now a ghostwriter for shiny pop acts and lazy politicians. He immediately got the clue in the cake’s name and after he’d finished laughing about the idea of a fake chocolate cake being called Milli Vanilla after the fake pop duo he began to wonder why she’d done it and, after some journalistic digging, he discovered Vera Foley’s secret and tweeted, Vera Foley’s Milli Vanilla is not the only fake thing about this baker. Within one hour his tweet had been shared 124,384 times and as Simon Kapalski and Carolyn Monroe watched the number of retweets climb from each felt they’d struck a blow for ghosts of every sort, everywhere.