Blaze and the Castle Cake for Bertha Daye

Book excerpt: Claude Ponti’s nimble wordplay and punning, combined with his phantasmagorical and joyful illustrations, create an endearing gem of a book, bound to be a bedtime story favorite. From one of the world’s most beloved children’s book authors comes a story of a high-spirited flock of friends building an unusual birthday cake. A rabble of soft, golden “chicklets” are awoken one morning to a startling proclamation: they only have ten short days to prepare for their best friend Bertha Daye’s party. It’s time to get to work building a larger-than-life castle cake to house and feed the revelers. Made of chocolate scooped out of chocolate mines, “finer than fairy dust” flour from the hillsides, and fruit carried down twigs and stems in the forest, this will be the best—and kookiest—cake of all time. Oodles of distinctive chicklets fill every page, scurrying, fluttering, napping, tumbling, helping, and getting up to no good. When the party day arrives, guests pour into the pastry palace, many of them unmistakable characters from iconic stories’ past, offering a marvelous who’s-who of story-book history.