Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

The Chocolate-Covered Clue

The Bobbsey Twins

#10 The Chocolate-Covered Clue by Laura Lee Hope (Stratemeyer Syndicate), 1989.

Before I begin, I’d like to acknowledge Sean Hagins, for supplying me with photos of this book! Usually, I take pictures of books myself, but I just couldn’t find a physical copy of this one. Sean is a big fan of the Bobbsey Twins, particularly the New Bobbsey Twins mysteries, and you can see some of his video reviews as well as videos about his photography work on his YouTube channel, SJHFoto. Thanks, Sean!

Flossie has made a new friend, Casey Baker, whose parents own Baker’s Bakery. They invite her to come for a tour of the bakery to see how they make everything. It means getting up very early on a school morning because the baking has to start very early. They need to have everything freshly baked by the time the bakery opens for customers. Although it’s difficult to get up that early, Flossie enjoys the tour, seeing the large electric mixers where they make the cake batter and the enormous oven where they can bake over 100 cookies at once.

While the Bakers are showing her everything, they all realize that they feel cold. Someone has left the door to the alley open. Nobody is around, so they assume that it must have just been left open by a deliveryman making an early delivery.

Later, while Flossie and Cassie are admiring a beautiful chocolate cake, something really strange happens. A masked man suddenly runs into the shop, grabs the cake, and runs away with it! Who could be so desperate for chocolate cake that they have to resort to theft? The Bobbsey Twins’ mother is covering a series of recent burglaries for the local newspaper, but this is the weirdest theft the kids have ever heard of.

It gets weirder as the day goes on. While Freddie and his mother are running errands, they stop at a diner, and the same masked man runs in and smashes the chocolate cake on the counter with his bare hands! Freddie tries to chase him, and the man throws cake at him. The cake that was smashed was also from Baker’s Bakery.

The Bobbsey Twins talk to Casey, and she tells them that someone stole their delivery list. From then on, this crazy cakenapper starts tracking down and stealing and smashing every chocolate cake Baker’s Bakery made that day – including the one that the Bobbseys had delivered to their house.

What’s behind all of this cake carnage and chocolate destruction? Does someone have a grudge against the Bakers or against chocolate-based desserts?

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction and Spoilers

I really liked the premise of this mystery! It’s such a fun, crazy concept of someone going all over town, smashing cakes, apparently for no reason. It’s the sort of mystery that I sometimes call a “Bizarre Happenings” mystery. That’s a mystery where strange things happen that encourage the characters to investigate, but it’s not obvious what’s behind it all or what sort of crime is really being committed. An example from adult literature would be the Sherlock Holmes story, The Red-Headed League, where the characters know that someone has been deceived into joining a special club for red-headed men that doesn’t actually exist and paid to copy entries from the encyclopedia, but they’re not sure why at first. In the case of the Bobbsey Twins mystery, the characters know that someone is stealing and destroying chocolate cakes, which is a very bizarre form of theft, but they’re not sure why. Readers can guess from the beginning that this rash of cake thefts is related to a different crime.

Actually, the solution to the story is very similar to that of another Sherlock Holmes story, The Adventure of the Six Napoleons, where someone is stealing and smashing busts of Napoleon. It has nothing to do with Napoleon or the busts themselves. There is something hidden inside one of the busts that someone is desperate to find, but because the busts all look alike, they have to track down and smash them all to find the one they really want. It’s like that with the cakes. The destruction of the cakes has nothing to do with the Baker family, their business, or the cakes themselves. Someone came into the bakery, looking for a place to hide, and dropped something in the cake batter while it was being mixed. Because the batter in the massive mixer was made into multiple cakes, they can’t be sure which cake now contains what they want. They need to track down the right cake in a hurry, before someone else finds what they hid. What seems to be an oddball crime puts the Bobbsey Twins up against a dangerous criminal!

Posted on by TracyC

In the Night Kitchen

In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak, 1970.

This is a very surreal children’s picture book about a strange dream that a boy has one night.

One night, a boy name Mickey is trying to sleep when he hears a strange thumping sound. He yells for the person making it to be quiet, and he suddenly finds himself falling out of bed.

He continues falling through the floors of his house and loses his pajamas. (Mickey is naked for most of the book, and at times, you can see his private parts in the pictures. The rest of the time, he is covered in batter. This is a very strange book.)

Mickey falls into a bowl of batter in the Night Kitchen, and the cooks mix him into the batter and try to bake him into a cake. However, Mickey climbs out of the oven and into some bread dough, which he shapes into an airplane.

The cooks cry out for milk for the cake they want to bake, so Mickey grabs their measuring cup and flies off in his bread dough airplane to find some.

He dives into a giant bottle of milk, losing the batter that was covering him. Mickey gets a cup of milk and pours it into the batter. The cooks are happy and bake their cake.

Then, Mickey slides down the side of the bottle and ends up in his own bed and in his pajamas again.

Apparently, the whole thing was a dream, but it’s a very odd dream. I didn’t like Mickey being naked in the pictures because I don’t see any particular reason why he should be. This would still be an odd, surreal dream even if he was wearing his pajamas through the whole adventure. It’s not terrible, but I did find that part a little unsettling and unnecessary. The rhymes in the text of the story were cute. I think it would sound nice read aloud.

The book is available to borrow for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

Posted on by TracyC

Detective McGruff Sniffs Out a Thief

Detective McGruff Sniffs Out a Thief by Megan Durand, illustrated by John Sullivan, 1983.

Sniffy books, or scratch-and-sniff books, were popular during my early childhood in the 1980s, and they are still being made today. Scratch-and-sniff books are picture books with special patches that release a scent when they’re scratched. Kids like interactive books, so it can be fun for them to scratch a flower or some food in a picture and then smell it. I know from my old books that these scented patches eventually wear out, although I’m amazed that some of them still have a scent more than 30 years after the books were originally made. I had expected that the ones that my brother and I liked and scratched the most would be the ones that would eventually wear out the fasted, but it also depends on the strength of the original scent. The milder, more subtle scents are often more difficult to smell decades later. Scratching a little harder can sometimes help. This picture book is a mystery story, and I thought that it was clever, using the sniffy patches as part of the mystery story.

Mrs. Tabby loves shopping, but she often forgets to pay attention to her purchases while she’s looking at other things. One day, someone steals her shopping bag while she’s trying on hats at a sale. It’s terrible because the bag contained the chocolate cake for her son’s birthday.

Fortunately, Detective McGruff is nearby when Mrs. Tabby realizes that her bag is missing. Unfortunately, finding it isn’t going to be easy because many people are carrying blue shopping bags that look like hers. Mrs. Tabby isn’t sure what to do, but McGruff decides to use his nose to sniff out the correct bag.

McGruff approaches various shoppers and gives their bags a sniff. All of the bags look alike, but readers can scratch and sniff the special patches on each bag and try to guess what they contain before McGruff reveals the truth.

After sniffing several bags, McGruff eventually locates the one that smells like chocolate and finds the cake. But, curing Mrs. Taffy of being forgetful is another matter.

Detective McGruff, or McGruff the Crime Dog, was created in the early 1980s as a mascot for anti-crime messages from U.S. police and law enforcement agencies through the National Crime Prevention Council, including anti-drug messages and information related to the issue of child abduction. Sometimes, police use McGruff costumes when visiting schoolchildren to talk to them about crime.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

Thunder Cake

ThunderCake

Thunder Cake by Patricia Polacco, 1990.

A girl talks about how her grandmother, who she likes to call “Babushka” because she originally came from Russia, cured her of her fear of storms by teaching her to make a special kind of cake, Thunder Cake.

The girl is staying with her grandmother on her farm in Michigan during the summer, and the sound of thunder terrifies the girl so much that she just wants to hide under the bed.  However, her grandmother insists that the girl come out and help her gather the ingredients for her Thunder Cake.

ThunderCakeGrandma

The grandmother explains to the girl how to tell how far away a storm is by counting the seconds between when she sees a flash of lightning and when she hears the sound of thunder.  She also says that they need to get the cake ready by the time the storm actually arrives, so they’d better hurry.

ThunderCakeIngredients

Keeping track of how close the storm is and getting all the ingredients together to make the cake helps to keep the girl busy, and by the time the storm actually arrives, she is no longer afraid.

ThunderCakeFinished

The pictures are an interesting combination of pencil drawings and bright colors.  The faces and hands of the girl and her grandmother are completely in pencil, but their clothes and everything around them are painted.

I didn’t include the recipe for Thunder Cake here because the book is still in print, and I have kind of a rule that I don’t include recipes from books that are still in print.  However, this recipe is one of the more well-known ones from children’s literature, and it’s pretty widely available on the Internet, some with pictures of the cakes people made from this recipe.  For example, this blog has a nice article about this book with helpful notes for those who want to try to make the cake.  This site also has the recipe along with some comments from others who tried it.  I was surprised the first time I read it that one of the ingredients in the chocolate cake was tomatoes, but the consensus seems to be that they are really necessary to make this cake properly.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.