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Crowley surveyed the shop, taking stock of the small packages set aside for his regular customers and double-checking that everything was ready for the day ahead.
The daily servings of mendiants for Maggie and Nipples of Venus for Nina, check. The women were not together yet, but only because Nina had refused to start another relationship immediately after escaping Sanders. In the past half a year, Nina had her hands full with revamping the café, updating the menu and renovating the interior. Her friends, Crowley included, spent more than one evening there helping her scrub, paint, decorate, and taste-test the new menu. But it was all worth it in the end. Give Me Breakfast or Give Me Death was now a quirky little café with a lot of personality instead of… whatever a dining equivalent of a dive bar was. And, if the quantities of Crowley’s chocolates Maggie and Nina bought for each other was any indication, they were firmly on their way to their happily ever after.
Orange cognac pralines and condensed milk chocolate truffles for Madame Tracy and Shadwell, check. The unlikely couple who were Crowley’s first regulars remained faithful to his chocolate. Well, Madame Tracy remained faithful to his chocolate, and Shadwell remained faithful to Madame. It took the chocolatier several months to find a recipe sweet and inoffensive enough to actually win over the grizzled old man, but soft balls of chocolate ganache, heavy on condensed milk with just a splash of rum, finally did the trick.
Chocolate covered fire ants for Gabriel, wrapped in a neat black parcel tied with a shiny black ribbon, check. The mayor’s complete personality makeover was probably the weirdest outcome of Crowley’s arrival at Tadfield. The night he spent vandalizing Crowley’s shop led to a spectacular scandal. It was picked up by newspapers as far away as London, courtesy of a London journalist who arrived at Tadfield the day before Easter and thus was perfectly poised to snap a dozen photos of the destruction that befell Sweet Temptations. Gabriel had to step down from his position as mayor, but he didn’t seem to mind. He got rid of his tailored suits in favour of sweater vests, asked everyone to call him Jim instead of Gabriel, and developed a childlike fascination with chocolate. His favourite so far was hot cocoa with whipped cream and just a sprinkle of chocolate shavings on top. He also developed a crush with Beez, which they accepted leniently; therefore, the ants.
Rows of chocolates tempted the customers from the glass display cases. Elegant autumnal flavours—pumpkin-macadamia clusters, orange pecan chocolate stars, coffee cinnamon pralines—were laid out next to seasonal fare: white chocolate-dipped strawberries with panicked eyes and screaming mouths, skulls and bones, brains, gravestones… That was not to say that the spooky confections lacked sophistication. The bats’ ganache was mango-flavoured (“They have to be, because then they’ll be fruit bats!” Aziraphale insisted when they brainstormed the recipes, and Crowley didn’t argue), jack-o’-lanterns tasted of gingered pumpkin, and witches’ cauldrons were filled with hazelnut caramel.
Today, though, unlike the chocolaterie’s early days, Crowley was not worried about ending the day with full trays of sad unwanted chocolates. The fortunes of the shop had turned quite dramatically.
As Gabriel was building out his new Jim persona, Crowley was struggling to figure out his own path forward. He had started the chocolaterie on a whim, as something between a vacation and a rebound project after losing The Taste of Heaven, without a long-term business plan. Between the controversy surrounding his arrival, the ensuing boycott, and the investigation into Lucien’s activities still going on back in London, he was far from certain that he would be staying—right up until the morning following Gabriel's break-in, when he had several revelations in quick succession.
Even after Crowley decided that he wanted to stay in Tadfield, he still had to work out whether he could afford that. The settlement with Lucien was as generous as it was well-earned, but not sufficient to keep an unprofitable shop indefinitely. The rent and the costs of running the chocolaterie added up quickly, especially since Crowley was used to top-quality ingredients and was not prepared to sacrifice quality. And even though the villagers were no longer wary of immorality and overindulgence awaiting them inside Sweet Temptations, Tadfield just didn’t have enough demand for premium chocolate to keep him afloat.
Help arrived from an unexpected quarter. As fate would have it, the newspaper reports of “Celebrity chocolatier Antoine J’s new shop in a backwater village and its less-than-welcome reception”, accompanied with photos of the mayor amidst the ruined Easter display, renewed the Londoners' interest in Crowley himself. Harriet, the mother of the goth kid who turned out to be a fan of dinosaurs and skeletons, just happened to catch the chocolatier in the mood to grumble about it to anybody who would listen. She didn’t have the patience to listen for too long, though.
“So they gossip about you, that’s free publicity!” she said decisively. “How are you going to use it?”
Crowley frowned at her. Back at The Taste of Heaven and before that, he made the chocolate and let somebody else figure out how to sell it. Dagmar, Lucien’s marketing specialist, ran the ad campaigns, auctioned off the chocolate statues he crafted, and kept track of current trends like ruby chocolate for him to incorporate into his new recipes. Here at Sweet Temptations he fell into the same pattern, creating exquisite confections and not paying much thought to anything beyond that.
“Do you have a website, at least? An online shop? Any online presence at all?” Harriet sighed, looking at Crowley’s clueless expression, and pulled up a notes app on her phone. “How do you feel about interviews…?”
Five months later, Sweet Temptations had a website with the chocolaterie’s profile by the same journalist who tracked Crowley down in Tadfield, an online shop, a pre-order form for a chocolate Advent Calendar, and, starting in October, a small roster of seasonal chocolate-making classes.
The adult class, Spooky Sweet, focused on making moulded truffles and decorating them. Crowley, with Harriet’s help, selected four pieces: a jack-o'-lantern, a white chocolate ghost, a dark chocolate barrel with a white spiderweb on it, and a vampire bat with white fangs. This allowed him to demonstrate a variety of techniques—using whimsical polycarbonate moulds, making flavoured ganache and liquor fillings for truffle centers, painting the moulds with coloured cocoa butter, adding accents in different chocolate—while keeping the participants engaged and the process simple enough to have everyone's creations set by the end of the class. The junior class, Skeletal Silhouettes, had the kids mould milk and dark chocolate into flat shapes of different animals and pipe white chocolate skeletons on top. Both classes sold out instantly, to Crowley’s surprise and Harriet's smug satisfaction. People came all the way from London to take a class and never left the chocolaterie without an extravagant purchase on top of the small box of their own creations.
The bell tinkled over the door, welcoming the first visitor of the day. Aziraphale, evicted from the parish house after leaving the church, was staying at Anathema’s guest room for the time being. Thankfully, Nina moved back to her apartment over the café after Sanders left, so it was not too crowded. It was not a sustainable situation in the long run either, and Aziraphale was looking into changing it, but career opportunities for ex-priests turned out to be limited. He volunteered at the library, helped Nina with her renovations, accompanied Crowley to the local artisans’ market when Harriet suggested selling his confections there, and tried hard to become a part of the community he used to preach to.
Crowley had to stop himself from inviting Aziraphale to stay at his place (indefinitely) multiple times, but the taste of the man’s forgiveness, still bitter on his lips, advised caution. He should let Aziraphale find his own way in life first, and to figure out whether that included Crowley too himself.
That didn’t stop the chocolatier from trying his best to spoil Aziraphale whenever he stopped by.
“Angel!” He greeted the man and got a beaming smile in return. “I need an expert to pick the next autumn flavour. What do you think, hazelnut latte chocolate swirls or milk chocolate apple pie with pecans?”
Crowley watched Aziraphale’s eyes light up with anticipation and soaked up the little sounds of pleasure he made as he tasted first the chocolate swirling with light and dark brown stripes and then the glossy apple-red one. Sometimes it was the small things, after all.