Tag Archives: Cake

358R: Bedtime Stories Collection Book

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This was a large, hardcover book of bedtime stories for children.  It was red with gold page edging.  One of the stories in it was about a baker who forgot his glasses.  He mixed up his ingredients and made raisin cookies and chocolate chip bread instead of raisin bread and chocolate chip cookies.  Then, while making a birthday cake for his niece, he is unable to read the recipe properly because he lost his glasses.  So instead of using 2 cups of flour, he uses two crates.  And instead of 2 eggs, he uses two dozen eggs.  Then he presents this ginormous cake to his niece, who loves it, and lets him know she found his glasses.  I believe it was called The Birthday Cake Mix-up or something like that.  The characters in most of the stories in this collection are bugs of some sort.  Another story is about a little girl trying to get her hair done but she doesn’t like any of the styles the hairdresser makes.  Eventually the hairdresser asks her what hairstyle she wants and she says she wants pony tails but her mom says they aren’t fancy enough.  So the hairdresser makes her fancy pony tails with ribbons and curls, and she is happy.

353Y: Dad bakes tire cake that is secretly pretty (Solved!)

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I’m looking for a children’s book that I read in the early 2000’s. The plot is that there’s a baking competition at this boy’s elementary school. All of his friend’s moms sign up to bake, but when he goes to ask his mom she can’t for whatever reason (I think she may have had work? I vaguely remember him lying in bed trying to fall asleep and hearing her type, but that might be wrong). His dad volunteers, and the kid is kind of embarrassed but he agrees. He wakes up the next morning and his dad has the cake under a cake server lid so he can’t see it. At some point he shows him the cake, and it basically looks like a large black tire. The kid is stressed that it’s not as pretty as the other cakes. The parents (all moms except the one dad) line up in a row and the teacher goes around tasting the cakes. When the teacher gets to the dad, he asks her for the knife to cut it. The kid becomes even more embarrassed because he thinks the dad is trying to be chivalrous. The dad takes the knife and instead of cutting the cake, he starts carving it. All of these beautiful rainbow flowers and designs start to appear and everyone is stunned and suitably impressed. I think they end up winning first place and there’s a happy ending.

346W: Boy Makes Cake

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I am looking for a childhood book and I remember it had a “Boy makes cake”. I remember a picture where the boy is making a cake and ingredients are all up wildly in the air. I grew up in the 70s but had several older siblings. Can you help? Thank you.

333A: Anthology – Tiger Fable, Dog Discipline, Bake a Cake

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I read this anthology of children’s literature when I was younger than 12 (I’m 29 now). These probably are not definite, and I don’t know if I would recognize the cover if I saw it, but here’s everything I can remember from it.

There was a Chinese (or some other Asian culture, possibly Indian but I think it was probably Chinese) fable about a group of village children who befriended a tiger. The village’s men chased off this tiger, and then the crops didn’t grow that year, or some similarly implied consequence ensued. I remember this story having an illustration of the children and the tiger under a tree. Or the tiger peering out from the branches of a tree.

There was also a story about a group of kids baking a cake for their babysitter, but they botched it up somehow, getting the ingredients wrong. I think that the babysitter found out about it, and was so grateful for their thoughtfulness that she bought or baked them a cake herself.

Then there was a poem about a kid explaining how he disciplines his dog with a rolled up newspaper. I also remember an illustration with a full-view of a backyard with some kids building a tree house, and there might have been a sign that said “No Girls.”

I don’t know when it was published, but the style was similar to the 40’s and 50’s style used in the “Dick and Jane” books. It might have a similar title to Good Times with Our Friends (a book by Dorothy Baruch) because I asked my Mom for it when I was a kid, and she confused the titles. I thought I’d found it when I ordered Through Golden Windows: Good Times Together, but although there were many similarities, the tiger story, dog poem and tree house picture weren’t in there.