Christmas & Cannolis by Peggy Jaeger 💕 Fun Facts, Book Tour & Gift Card Giveaway 💕 (Holiday Romance)

Thursday, December 13, 2018

Christmas & Cannolis by Peggy Jaeger 💕 Fun Facts, Book Tour & Gift Card Giveaway 💕 (Holiday Romance)

This blog post contains affiliate links. Click Here for details.

With Christmas season in full swing, baker Regina San Valentino is up to her elbows in cake batter and cookie dough. Between running her own business, filling her bursting holiday order book, and managing her crazy Italian family, she’s got no time to relax, no room for more custom cake orders, and no desire to find love. A failed marriage and a personal tragedy have convinced her she’s better off alone. Then a handsome stranger enters her bakery begging for help. Regina can’t find it in her heart to refuse him.

Connor Gilhooly is in a bind. He needs a specialty cake for an upcoming fundraiser and puts himself—and his company’s reputation—in Regina’s capable hands. What he doesn’t plan on is falling for a woman with heartbreak in her eyes or dealing with a wise-guy father and a disapproving family.

Can Regina lay her past to rest and trust the man who’s awoken her heart?

I fancy myself a fairly good baker. Not professional caliber, by any means. But I do…okay. If you ask my friends and family they might say I do more than okay, but I think that’s just because they love all the goodies I’m always making for them. Hee hee.

Since CHRISTMAS and CANNOLIS is about a professional baker and I’m an amateur at best, I wanted to make sure I got all the little details correct with regards to Regina’s baking process and her bakery, just in case any bakers who were of professional caliber read the book. There’s nothing worse than reading something and you find a detail that’s so wrong it makes you not want to read any more of the book. This, by the way, has happened to me on two occasions with uber-famous authors. I blame their fact checkers, but that’s for another blog piece.

Anyhoooooo.

I wanted to make sure the recipes, decorating implements, even the types of flavor profiles Regina San Valentino used in her bakery, were realistic and true to form. To ensure that, I did my own form of research: I baked. A lot.

A whole lot.

I baked so much I gained nine pounds because I had to…you know…taste everything to make sure it was good.

This was the first time I’ve ever written anything that actually changed me. Literally, changed me. I went up a pant size. I’ve written an entire series about cooking, the WILL COOK FOR LOVE SERIES, about chefs and never gained an ounce. With this book, though, all bets went out the window.

Am I upset about that? Nah. As far as research goes, it was well worth it. I tried a few new flavors for cakes I wouldn’t have ordinarily tried on my friends and family, all to rave reviews. My house smelled amazeballs for weeks when I was trying out new recipes for cakes, cookies, and cupcakes. Baking is an art form, but it really boils down to formulas. This much flour needs to have this much liquid, added to this much sugar, etc, for the entire mixture to rise, cook, and not turn out lumpy, dumpy, and unappealing.

Weren’t they three of Snow White’s dwarf friends?

You need the right mixture, the correct balance of ingredients. With cooking you can throw in a little of this and toss in a bit of that, but with baking you need to stick to the basics for the most part. The fun part is when you get to play with flavors.

The members of my family are now solid fans of savory breads and cakes, and light and airy cookies with a bit of bite to them.

So, I’m not bemoaning those extra nine pounds. I’ll lose them…eventually. After all, I can’t bake all the time, can I?

Hee hee.

I spotted my customer in the seat my mother indicated. His back was toward me, but I could tell he was tall from how much of him shot up from the chair. Since I didn’t know how to address him, I simply said, “Excuse me?” when I finally arrived at the table. I was all set to introduce myself and ask how I could help him, but before the words could form in my throat I was struck mute. Truly. I stopped short, my mouth falling open like unfilled cannoli shells, and no sound came out.

He turned to me at the exact moment a slice of midday November sunlight streamed through the window, landing right on him and surrounding his head in a halo of bright, brilliant light. I wouldn’t have been surprised if a choir of angels started belting out celestial high notes because the guy could have been a charter member of the Messenger of God club.

Facially, he looked a little older than my thirty-two, but not over the forty-year mark yet. Where my hair is the color of wet ink, his was a shock of silver threaded with faint stripes of peppery black above his ears. It looked so thick and touch-worthy, the tips of my fingers were actually tingling to clutch the ends and grab on. Eyes the color of threatening storm clouds—gray and tinged with pale shards of blue—peered up at me, a question pulling at their corners. Eyelashes most women had to pay for framed his lids naturally. His jaw was square, his cheekbones carved from marble by a master sculptor.

But his mouth—Madre di Dio, his mouth. It was about as perfect as two lips meeting in the center of a face could be. Full and thick with that natural rimmed outline women were forced to create with a liner pencil, it was the most kissable mouth I’d ever seen. Tinted the color of aged Barolo—my father’s favorite wine—ripe and smooth, full-bodied and intense, it simply stopped me in my tracks.

Peggy Jaeger is a contemporary romance writer who writes about strong women, the families who support them, and the men who can’t live without them. 
Family and food play huge roles in Peggy’s stories because she believes there is nothing that holds a family structure together like sharing a meal…or two…or ten. Dotted with humor and characters that are as real as they are loving, Peggy brings all topics of daily life into her stories: life, death, sibling rivalry, illness and the desire for everyone to find their own happily ever after. Growing up the only child of divorced parents she longed for sisters, brothers and a family that vowed to stick together no matter what came their way. Through her books, she has created the families she wanted as that lonely child. 
Tying into her love of families, her children's book, THE KINDNESS TALES, was illustrated by her artist mother-in-law.  
Peggy holds a master's degree in Nursing Administration and first found publication with several articles she authored on Alzheimer's Disease during her time running an Alzheimer's in-patient care unit during the 1990s.
In 2013, she placed first in two categories in the Dixie Kane Memorial Contest: Single Title Contemporary Romance and Short/Long Contemporary Romance.
In 2017 she came in 3rd in the New England Reader's Choice contest for A KISS UNDER THE CHRISTMAS LIGHTS and is a finalist in the 2017 STILETTO contest for the same title.  A lifelong and avid romance reader and writer, she is a member of RWA and her local New Hampshire RWA Chapter.