‘GESINE’S. How can I help you?’

‘Gesine?’

‘Yup. This is she.’

Bear witness to a miracle. I never cop to my identity when I answer the phone at the shop. It leads to avenues of small talk for which I have no patience. And the best way to test my patience is to mispronounce my name. Straight off. After I’ve just answered the phone and pronounced it.

‘Gesine’s, how can I help you?’

‘Is this Jazeen’s? The bakery?’

‘Yes, this is Geh-see-neh’s. How can I help you?’

This is where I raise the stakes. The first time, fine. No one’s really listening when you first answer the phone. Can’t expect them to pick up on the pronunciation straight off. So I take my time, releasing each syllable slowly. Putting the full hochdeutsch spin on it, staking a claim in the integrity of my name and asking the caller to take the hint and respect it, and at the very least, to try not to malign it again.

‘Great. Am I speaking to Jazeen?’

‘She’s not in. Can I help you with anything?’

Say it right, with the hard g and the soft s, and release the last e with a sigh (more of an ‘eh’ than an ‘ah,’ but if you get this far, I’ll accept either), and I’m putty. But just because the conversation started well thanks to the mellifluous sound of my name done right doesn’t mean that the rest of the conversation is going to please me.

‘It’s Carol.’

Carol, my doctor and a regular. By regular, I mean every morning at 7 a.m. and most afternoons. She gets a small cherry pie every Friday – pie day. I save a cherry turnover if I ever get around to making them. She’s a regular’s regular.

‘About the cherry pie I got today. I think I prefer, even if it means less cherry, a less congealed filling. Maybe less cornstarch or something.’

‘I know exactly what you mean. Thanks for telling me. Consider it fixed.’

Rookie mistake. Bush-league baking. Utter nitwittery on a huge scale. It breaks my heart that I let something like this slip.

And this is what really sucks – I didn’t make it. Not this time. I’ve screwed up plenty. Too salty, under baked, too sweet, kept in the freezer to set too long and still frozen when served. It happens and it’s the end of the world every time. But worse than screwing up personally, where I can look back and identify the boneheaded mistake and fix it forevermore, is entrusting someone else to help. And then they screw it up. Because it’s still my mistake; it’s my shop. My standards. My fault. My shame spiral from which it will take a day to recover.

Do I have to do everything? Am I allowed to sleep? Ever? And what if my dog gets sick? What if Inu, my wonder Frisbee dog, suddenly stops catching the disk on the left side, behaving as if it’s disappeared into the ether, only to find out he’s gone blind? This happened. And the other side’s going too unless I drive the four hours to Rhode Island immediately to get his retina skewered into place! Somebody else is going to have to make the cherry filling.

And so it goes, an innocent call setting off a spate of record-breaking nihilism that illuminates just how precarious the whole operation is. The winter of 2007 was the prizewinner for misery. I was holding on to my sanity by a filament of spun sugar. Ray was out of town working in Hollywood all season. But he filled the void with a new puppy. To add to this bounty, we were in the seventh year of a seven-year storm cycle. Every seven years, it snows a lot. It snows a lot every winter in Vermont. The winter of 2007, by December, I couldn’t see out of the first-floor windows of our house. Snow kept piling on, foot after powdery foot. The path to and from the house to the barn turned into a fun-house slide; the roads were even worse. If you scream bloody murder at 4 a.m. fishtailing out of your driveway and skid to a stop buried in a snow bank in the woods, can anyone hear you? Apparently not.

Around this time, Tim slipped and broke his collarbone. Tim wasn’t just helping me bake. He was doubling as our dishwasher. We actually had a dishwasher. She was lovely. Just a little developmentally challenged. She was in a program whose aim was to give her independence, and we wanted to help. So a few hours before she came in, Tim did the dishes, leaving a handful behind. She came in for a few hours, washed about ten things, and left. Tim and I would carry the dirty dishes we’d been hiding to the sink and he finished the rest. So now I was the dishwasher too. I was not sleeping.

Between the baking, the dishwashing, and the Shetland-sized puppy that used me as a mattress, I was a mess. Perhaps it wouldn’t have been so depressing if we were making money at the shop. But we weren’t. The snow and the economy kept everyone at home. Our entire town saw a 20 per cent decrease in business. Everyone talked about shutting their doors. And I missed Ray, but considering the financial pit we were in, he’d have to keep working on films to pay the mortgage.

We’re finally digging out of the financial disaster from that winter, but a tax bill could still arrive and erase every cent we have, just when we thought we could actually pay our vendors. Maybe ourselves. Or my favourite mixer gets fried. The water heater explodes. A customer trips outside the shop and breaks her arm. A cherry pie is gummy. Someone finds a washer in a pastry. It’s time for Ray and Gesine’s monthly conversation entitled ‘How much longer can we do this?’

The potential lawsuit, this is something my aunt, Tante Erika, brought up first thing. She’s an extraordinary baker. I still ask her to send me Christmas cookies when I’m knee-deep in holiday baking. But when I told her I was opening a pastry shop, something that I thought would appeal to her immeasurably, her initial reaction was to bring up the potential danger I might inflict. A hair. Salmonella. Random body part.

I’d witnessed class-action lawsuits in the making firsthand at the Vermont Venture Center. Large-scale pie makers found a bolt in their pie dough. It came from the ten-ton rotary mixer hidden in the back room behind the walk-in cooler. They found the bolt before they’d filled the pie, packaged it, or sold it, so crisis averted. Until they realised that there was a washer missing as well. And upon closer inspection of the equipment, they noticed a few other bits that weren’t accounted for and may or may not have been party to this metal exodus. Or they could have escaped in an earlier batch of dough that had already been shipped and was just biding its time in a supermarket freezer until Grandma takes it home, bites right into it, and shatters her jaw.

I remember thinking quite clearly, this won’t happen to me. I’m in control of everything, every ingredient, every piece of equipment. I’m a small-scale operator and anal-retentive. I’m better, smarter, more together, less stoned; I’ve got higher standards. I’ll get my own space with shiny new equipment and I’ll do it perfectly.

But a customer did find a washer in an otherwise beautifully executed vacherin one day. We’d been open almost two years and I already had a string of minor disasters behind me. But this was dangerous. And I discovered that no matter how perfectly I think everything is going, equipment doesn’t always give you a heads-up when it’s about to implode.

I could have killed someone. Our customer brought in the washer and reassured us that no one choked. No teeth were broken. But there it was nonetheless.

Just keeping standards unbearably high, baking like you really mean it every single day, is exhausting. I’m sick of making macaroons. I won’t make them everyday. I just won’t. You can’t make me. There are days that I dread making Danish. The day-long process of making the dough, making the fillings, rolling the dough with painful precision, and measuring and cutting and then starting all over again. And I loathe carrot cake. For a year, Tim couldn’t make carrot cake without adding a tear of despair to the batter. Cakes fell for no apparent reason at random intervals. We endured an entire year of sheet pan after sheet pan of cratered cakes. And then Tim slipped on that fresh patch of ice outside while getting blueberries, and was out for six weeks. I inherited the accursed carrot cakes. One day I figured it out, the mysterious reason behind the sudden failure of what once was a perfect recipe: we weren’t putting in enough carrot. After years of peeling, cutting, grating, and then rechopping batch after batch of carrots, we’d got progressively lazier and started using less and less carrot until we’d reached a point where the cake protested. ‘Screw you guys! I’m not working with you until you give me back my carrots.’

You add to these small annoyances lack of sleep, taxes, vendor bills, health inspector visits, and wild card employees, and my dream bakery turns into a shop of horrors.

The week after Carol called to gently complain about her gummy pie, I made everything myself. Hundreds of little pies, some with ruby red cherries and hand-braided lattice crusts, double-crusted caramel apple with a sprinkling of shiny sanding sugar, and wild blueberry with buttery sweet crumbles. When the cherries boiled, I added the perfect amount of cornstarch slurry to stiffen the juices and keep it from being runny. When I folded the butter into the pie dough, I knew when I’d finished my last turn that the crusts would be at their ultimate flakiness. I filled the case with my pies and I set aside a cherry to give to Carol, to apologise for the week before and to prove that I was true to my culinary word and reputation.

Lily poked her head back into the kitchen. ‘The pies look particularly beautiful today. And Carol said it was the best cherry pie ever.’

That’s exactly what I wanted to hear. What’s bittersweet is that I want to hear it everyday; I want to be creating nonstop brilliance. Small and large misfortunes keep it from being a constant reality. But I’ll keep trying because the beauty of a well-made pie is as close to magic as hearing my name pronounced with the perfect sigh on the last syllable.