"Today is Grandma's birthday,
and Granddad has an itchin'
to bake a whopper chocolate cake
and traumatize the kitchen."
With these words, the story of the whopper cake begins in Karma Wilson and Will Hillenbrand's Whopper Cake. You might know Karma Wilson as the author of the Bear Snores On, The Bear Wants More, and other books about Bear. The librarian introduced me to Whopper Cake a few years ago when Red was a toddler, and I came across it at the library again a couple weeks ago. I thought, what a great book to read to Tom Thumb leading up to his birthday!
I love Wilson's fun, off beat rhyming style. The rhyming paired with the story makes kid magic! Tom Thumb loves it! That crazy Granddad just keep adding more and more ingredients than the recipe calls for. At one point, the recipe calls for 4 eggs and he adds 86! As the amount of batter grows, it winds up in a pickup truck bed being stirred with an oar from their rowboat. In the end, the cake gets baked by the hot July sun in the truck bed and the whole town comes over to surprise Grandma and celebrate. The cherry on the cake is when Grandma says she has but one birthday wish --- I'll enjoy this whopper cake and you clean up the mess (the whopper mess that is). Love it! Not to mention, there is literally a recipe for whopper cake in the back of the book.
With Red, I was really deliberate about what read alouds I picked for her as a preschooler. I often drew from the lists of others, like the Ambleside Year 0 list and The Simply Charlotte Mason Early Years list. While I still think these lists are valuable, I'm going to get a little more adventurous in the kids' section with Tom Thumb and really try to find some new gems to share over the coming months. I hope you'll join in and comment if you've read the book or if you've found any good reads for your little ones lately.
So who else wants to bake a whopper cake?
No comments:
Post a Comment