I had a house full this week, my niece, her partner and their 5 children visiting and, it being cherry season here in BC, I took the opportunity to make my favorite Cherry Cake. It’s sort of like the French Clafoutis but the beaten egg whites make it more of a cake, less pie. And the almond extract makes it smell amazing!
We’ve been lucky to have a prolific cherry tree for many years and I make this cake form either fresh or frozen cherries. Best eaten the first day – as if you could resist!
Hi Everyone!
When I finished writing Home for Christmas, Louise and Blue’s story, I sat back and thought about where everyone in Fortune Bay was in their lives at this point. Louise and Blue were fine, all lovey-dovely, Louise moving into Blue’s new log house, both of them ecstatic about the possibility of twins.
But what about Frankie and Sean? By spring, it had been five months since they found Amber—or rather, since she found Sean. Now he and Amber were living with his mom Stephanie, and Frankie was living alone—not the best situation for Sean and Frankie – or for Stephanie and Max.
And what about Amber? It was hard to believe everything was just smooth sailing for her after such a huge upheaval in her life.
By now you have probably figured out how real these characters are to me! Lol. I couldn’t leave them in this situation. The story started to grow and turned into this sequel novella, written specially for my most loyal readers who have been reading all the Murphy family Fortune Bay books.
If you haven’t read the other books, do yourself a favor and put this book aside until you have.
I hope you enjoy Family Matters as much as I enjoyed writing it!
Judy Hudson
One reader obviously felt the same way when they finished The Good Neighbor.
I hope she finds this book now. If she is on my mailing list she’ll know by now.
Thanks for reading,
Available at:
AND MOST OTHER ONLINE BOOKSELLERS
I wrote Lake of Dreams to give away. I imagined it as a fun little book – could see Colleen dancing on the dock in her cowboy boots – and was surprised at the personal, poignant themes that emerged as I wrote.
As a child, I went to cottages belonging to family and friends and always envied the kids whose families had cottages of their own. Eventually, I was lucky enough to marry into one of those families.
My husband’s family cottage was on a lake in Muskoka, in rugged, rocky northern Ontario. From the stories I heard, he and his four brothers and sisters ran wild there for two months every summer throughout their childhood and teens. Later, our own children got to experience the fishing and boating too for a few weeks every summer.
On the long weekend in the middle of the summer, the whole active, extended family would meet there for the annual regatta. (Watch for a regatta book to show up in the Fortune Bay series.) The cottage would groan but accepted us all in the grouping of small sleeping cabins around the central cabin. Our favourite place to congregate was on the screened-in porch, called a Muskoka room, a must at dusk to hold back the mosquitoes.
My father-in-law, the patriarch of the family, was a lawyer and eventually a judge, but up at the lake he was more like Alex’s grandfather than his father. There was a dock with a boathouse and a couple of boats, including canoes hung in slings against the far wall and a rowboat that we used daily. Early morning paddles on lake to the sound of loons were particularly magical.
The cabin on Fortune Bay is an amalgam of one of the cottages in the compound (the one with the washroom outside at the end of the porch), a cute white cottage down the lake that always seemed empty, and a cabin on the lake here on Vancouver Island. Like everything else I write, there is a touchstone of truth, although it is usually unrecognizable by the time it hits the page.
Eventually my in-laws could no longer manage the hill, and when the grandfather died, we were not as lucky as Alex and were not able to keep the cottage. A few years later I wrote Lake of Dreams, channeling fond memories of summers on that Ontario lake.
A weird thing happened after I published Lake of Dreams. I was checking the listing, I think it was iTunes, and although the cover said LOD was set in the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state, right beside the book on the online page was a listing for the Logging Chain Lodge. Looking closer, I saw that the lodge was set in the tiny village not 5 miles away from our cottage in Ontario. Coincidence? I think not.
Is there a place that is near and dear to your heart, where you can get away from your regular life and kick back? Or a place you remember where you’d love to return? I’d love to hear about it. Also any questions or comments on the book.
Last week I was channeling Louise, the pastry chef in Home for Christmas as I made a ridiculously fancy but really quite easy to make batch of Raspberry and White Chocolate Macarons. People often ask if my characters are like me, or me them, and I always say no but, the truth is, there is a bit of me in most of them.
My editor Stephanie Webb is hosting a tea the next day 
(she’s a Brit) to celebrate the birthday of a mutual friend. “A good excuse to air out the linen,” she said. She’s done it before and it’s lots of fun. She made fancy party sandwiches and little cakes – scones last time if I remember correctly. But when I saw her last week I heard myself say, “I’ll bring a plate of fancy cookies.”
Fancy, because anything she made for this event was bound to be fancy, but any one who knows me well knows that Oatmeal Chocolate Chip, or Children’s Delight is my normal baking style. Something hearty with a little food value. I used to cut the amount of sugar in half and until my kids refused to eat my cookies. Now I rarely make cookies at all, but these macarons caught my eye in a flier in the paper and strangely, I had just cleaned out the baking cupboard and kne
w I had all the ingredients: white chocolate, ground almonds, raspberry freezer jam (the best!).
The macarons were much easier than I anticipated. Not really a trick at all. I made the macarons the day before while watching the World Figure Skating Championships on TV (Yay Canada!) and made the filling Sunday morning before the party.
They were such a hit, I thought I’d put the recipe here to give you time to make them for a special Easter dinner treat.
Louise would be proud.
Let me know how they turn out.
Although I’ve been hunkered down in my office everyday for months, only emerging for food and coffee, it’s only now that I’ve written the first chapter of the next Fortune Bay book (sorry, not even a working title yet) that I feel like I’m back to work.
I’ve been busy since publishing Home for Christmas November first. (Eek! 5 months ago!) Besides Cuba, Christmas and the dreaded annual family business year end, a final (I think) edit of my 
Mayan murder mystery (more about that in a later post) and endless publishing, promotion and general book-business housekeeping, I also wrote a sequel novella to the Murphy family trilogy, called Family Matters. At the moment, I am reserving this book for a group of supportive readers whom I know have finished The Good Neighbor and Home for Christmas because it really is a sequel to those books and should be read after the other two. (If you’ve read those books and reviewed them, just let me know at Judy@JudithHudsonAuthor.com and I’ll add you to the selected readers list.)
Then there was the nasty finger problem that involved 6 months with a splint on the middle finger of my right hand that made typing a challenge, and probably had something to do with the fact that I did not jump right into writing another full-length book. But, I’m pleased to say, the stitches came out today! break out the champagne! Let’s just hope the digit says healthy.
I’ve also started plotting another mystery (yes, it’s a series) and a new trilogy of books set down the 
shore of Majestic Lake. So far, I think of it as the three-sisters-who-have-never-met-before-inherit-a-very-funky-old-hunting-lodge-from-the-grandfather-they-never-knew trilogy. Here’s the photo that inspired that one. I don’t think it will materialize on paper though for at least a few months.
So I’ve been juggling the three books in my head for over a month, a very confusing stage to be at, and this week when I finally started typing page one, Lily’s book came out the winner.
Lily showed up in Family Matters, but you won’t have to read FM first to enjoy this book. She’s Max’s daughter who has run to Fortune Bay for reasons that are just beginning to reveal themselves. (I’m only on chapter two.) But I do know that Pierre, the new French-Canadian chef at the resort will somehow be involved in helping her working out her problems, and I’d hazard a guess that she helps him, too.
So, I’ll get to work, and keep you up to date on my progress. That’s all for now,
