This is a fun story for those little ones who love to help mom or dad in the kitchen. The Duchess Bakes a Cake is told through rhyming couplets and alliteration sprinkled throughout to create a very pleasant cadence for reading aloud; "So she [The Duchess] raced down the turret, three steps and one leap/ Cleared the help from the kitchen and said 'Don't you peep./ You'll all be delighted, for I'm going to make a lovely luscious delectable cake." The pictures are not highly detailed and use only black, green, and red, but the simplicity of the pictures wonderfully compliments the lyrical and imaginative story.

Be ready for your little one to ask you "What's that?" as they learn some new vocabulary words, like 'suet', 'cruet', 'laurel', 'squill', and 'angelica' - and those are just a few of the Duchess' cake ingredients! Details in the story will likely bring smiles to both you and your little one's face, such as the 13 children's names, or how the cake batter gets noticeably bigger and higher with each turn of the page. The pictures are also great for counting, whether your child is counting the number of children, the number of castles, or the number of shields, there is something fun to count of every page!

My three year-old friend Sam wanted to know if the book could be true - will adding extra yeast to a cake mix make it grow uncontrollably?  My response was, "Well, it would make an almost uncontrollable mess. PLEASE don't try it. But, I told him that I thought it would only grow really big in his imagination."

 

--Audra