The Magic Cake Shop

by Meika Hashimoto

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2011 by Meika Hashimoto

  Jacket art and interior illustrations copyright © 2011 by Josée Masse

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Random House and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Visit us on the Web! www.randomhouse.com/teens

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at www.randomhouse.com/teachers

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hashimoto, Meika.

  The magic cake shop / by Meika Hashimoto; illustrations by Josée Masse. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: When ten-year-old Emma Burblee’s beautiful but snobbish parents banish her to Nummington for the summer with her loathsome Uncle Simon, she is befriended by the seemingly magical town baker, Mr. Crackle, who soon becomes a target of Simon and his cohort.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-89874-7

  [1. Bakers and bakeries—Fiction. 2. Magic—Fiction. 3. Conduct of life—Fiction.

  4. Uncles—Fiction.] I. Masse, Josée, ill. II. Title.

  PZ7.H27Mag 2011 [Fic]—dc22 2010041098

  Random House Children’s Books supports the

  First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  For

  who loves dessert even more

  than his bigger sister

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1. Meet the Burblees

  2. Emma

  3. Chocolate Lover’s Delight

  4. Mrs. Burblee’s Plan

  5. The Birthday Party

  6. Nummington

  7. The Cake Shop

  8. Uncle Simon’s

  9. Cooking and Cleaning

  10. Mr. Crackle

  11. The Visitor

  12. A Soapy Idea

  13. The Plan Unfolds

  14. Discovered

  15. To the Cake Shop

  16. Morning

  17. Mr. Crackle’s Story

  18. The Recipe

  19. Getting Ready

  20. Still Getting Ready

  21. The Prickled Hat

  22. Down the Flour Barrel

  23. The Spice Shop

  24. Spice Exploration

  25. Mr. Crackle’s Past Mistakes

  26. A Little Translating

  27. Burberry Beans and Wibbly Cobbyseed

  28. Lifflets

  29. The Last Step

  30. Creeker’s Curse

  31. An Unpleasant Arrival

  32. The Anchovy and the Brussels Sprout

  33. Puffs of Green

  About the Author

  Mr. and Mrs. Burblee were very beautiful. Mrs. Burblee had a delicate chin, dainty earlobes, and a charming smile. Mr. Burblee had a rugged chin, manly earlobes, and a winning smile.

  When Mrs. Burblee went for a walk, many a man tripped over his feet in a rush to say hello. If Mrs. Burblee said hello back, the goggle-eyed man usually fell off the sidewalk, sometimes into oncoming traffic.

  Mrs. Burblee took this as a compliment.

  When Mr. Burblee took a ride on his motorcycle, he liked to grin at the lady drivers at stoplights. They usually fainted. In the past year, Mr. Burblee had been responsible for eighty-two traffic jams.

  He liked to keep count.

  From the moment they opened their dazzling eyes in the morning to their eighty-step face-washing ritual before bed, the Burblees busied themselves with powdering, perfuming, and polishing. When they weren’t applying lotion or slicking hair or beautifying themselves in hundreds of ways, they bickered over who got to be admired.

  “What shall we talk about today?” Mr. Burblee asked Mrs. Burblee one morning over a breakfast of carrots and celery. “Shall it be the noble shape of my nose or my fabulously silky locks of hair?”

  Mrs. Burblee pouted her rosy lips and frowned. “We talked about your hair yesterday. It’s my turn. I want to compose poems about the graceful curves of my feet.”

  “As long as it’s my nose tomorrow,” Mr. Burblee huffed, sinking his pearly teeth into a celery stick.

  For the rest of the day, they wrote odes to Mrs. Burblee’s feet.

  The Burblees lived in a fancy apartment building named Stoney Henge in a wildly expensive part of the city. Stoney Henge was built of solid steel and granite. High-heeled women clacked their way through the lobby night and day, while loud-talking men in suits bragged about their latest business deal. The elevator buttons were lined with diamonds that had a nasty habit of nicking fingers.

  Inside the Burblees’ apartment, expensive furniture was perfectly arranged throughout each room. In the dining room, gold-encrusted stone-hard chairs made for stylish but uncomfortable mealtimes. Snarling gargoyles in the bathroom stared at anyone who entered and made it difficult to do one’s business.

  In the Burblees’ bedroom, gigantic dressers stuffed with Mr. Burblee’s designer socks stood next to shelves full of Mrs. Burblee’s nail products. Deep closets opened up to a carefully arranged onslaught of accessories, including Mr. Burblee’s prize collection of polka-dot ties and Mrs. Burblee’s three hundred pairs of earmuffs.

  The spare room next door held nothing but clothes.

  The Burblees had lived in Stoney Henge ever since Mr. Burblee made millions off a fancy hat boutique called Chic-Chic. The boutique was the sort that had tall, thin-lipped clerks with pointy noses that they would stick up if you didn’t enter the shop with the latest style of purse or sunglasses. Chic-Chic decorated hats with things like hummingbirds and mousetraps and insisted the models be photographed in places like Mozambique and Antarctica. This was supposed to make the hats seem more fashionable.

  Mr. Burblee was very good at bringing customers to Chic-Chic. “The trick,” he boasted to Mrs. Burblee one night at dinner, “is to make women feel rotten about themselves. Once you make them feel ugly, they’ll be desperate to buy anything that seems to make them instantly beautiful.”

  “Is that so?” murmured Mrs. Burblee, picking daintily at her lettuce.

  “Remember that commercial I ran on television last year? The one where I painted zits on your nose and warts on your cheeks and had you wear that hideous wig with gray streaks?”

  “And then you had me wander into Chic-Chic, put on a hat, and transform into my usual ravishing self? Yes, I remember—I was there,” said Mrs. Burblee with a touch of irritation. “You never stop talking about that commercial. I know it was a success and we made a fortune, but you really had nothing to do with it.”

  “Of course I did! I came up with the idea!” sputtered Mr. Burblee.

  “But I was the model. Without me, no one would have remembered your idea. My irresistible beauty is the reason why Chic-Chic is so popular.” Mrs. Burblee smiled and primped her hair.

  Mr. Burblee scowled.

  “Don’t scowl—you’ll get wrinkles,” said Mrs. Burblee.

  They finished the rest of their dinner in silence.

  In addition to being a model for Chic-Chic, once a week Mrs. Burblee pumped up sales by working behind the counter at the boutique. She was very good at charming hordes of men into buying pricey eggbeater or porcelain hats. “Trust me,” Mrs. Burblee would coo to a male customer, “your wife will love it.” She would give him a smoldering look, and before he knew it, the befuddled man would have his credit card swiped and hi
s hands full of a hatbox.

  Chic-Chic had a no-return, no-refund policy.

  Working together, the Burblees did ripping good business. Mrs. Burblee bamboozled men into handing over their wallets, and Mr. Burblee’s commercials brought in women desperate to seem fashionable at any cost.

  Chic-Chic allowed the Burblees to live a life of complete luxury. They drank fancy champagne and ate rare caviar by the gallon. Mrs. Burblee had a jewelry box stuffed with emeralds and pearls. Mr. Burblee kept his seventeen yachts in the most expensive boathouse in the city. Together they owned a small island in a fashionable part of the Pacific Ocean.

  But despite their wildly good looks and fortune, the Burblees had one great, terrible blot on their dipped-in-gold world.

  In their opinions, Mr. and Mrs. Burblee had the perfect, most beautiful life—except for one annoying detail.

  That detail was a little girl called Emma.

  Emma was Mr. and Mrs. Burblee’s daughter. When Mrs. Burblee saw her baby for the first time, she shuddered. “Gracious, I do hope she grows into something more becoming.”

  Mr. Burblee glanced at Emma’s straight brown hair, smatter of freckles, and steady brown eyes. He patted his wife’s hand. “Don’t worry, darling. She’s sure to become a stunner.” He poked at a freckle on Emma’s face. “And if she doesn’t turn into a first-rate beauty, there’s sure to be surgery and operations to fix her.”

  But Emma did not turn into an angelic vision of loveliness. Her teeth grew in slightly crooked. Her freckles increased year by year. Her hair stayed straight. Her eyes remained brown and steady—though as she grew older, they developed a glint of fire.

  Emma gave her parents more headaches than they could count. Every time Mr. and Mrs. Burblee tried a beauty treatment on her, she found a way to undo their efforts. She refused to have her teeth straightened or her ears pierced or her eyebrows plucked. When Mrs. Burblee dragged her to a salon to curl her hair, Emma kicked the stylist and got banned from the salon. When Mr. Burblee bought her an uncomfortably stylish dress for her sixth birthday, it was found three days later in the local pet shop. Someone had neatly shredded the dress into bedding for the display puppies to nap in.

  Emma never kept her dresses clean and wore pants when Mrs. Burblee wasn’t looking. She avoided baths and toothpaste like the plague. Much to her parents’ horror, she did not dive into a world of nail polish and lipstick and glamour products. Instead, she spent most of her time digging for buried treasure in the park with Charles, the Burblees’ chauffeur.

  Not only did Emma drive her parents nuts by not caring about her looks, but she also bothered them with the Troubles of the World. One day she came home from school, her face flushed with anger. Mrs. Burblee took one look at her daughter and said, “Emma, you look horrible! Your face is all splotchy.”

  “Mom, guess what I learned today!” Emma threw down her book bag and stood shaking with fury.

  “Well, for heaven’s sake, be less loud when you’re mad—it’ll ruin your vocal cords. And you have got to learn how to look angry without your face turning into a pepperoni pie—it’s unladylike.”

  “Did you know that every five seconds a child dies of hunger?”

  Mrs. Burblee paused. “Who told you that?”

  “Ms. Bailey, my social studies teacher.”

  Mrs. Burblee sighed. “First of all, you should not be upset over something so silly. Why, some mothers I know would just die to be as thin as starving children. And second of all, I refuse to have a teacher make my daughter look like a blotchy, splotchy mess. I’m calling your principal right away and having that awful woman fired.” Mrs. Burblee took out her phone, hunted for a number, then pressed a button.

  “That is not the point!” Emma said.

  Mrs. Burblee frowned. “Hello, Principal Jenkins? Yes, this is Emma Burblee’s mother. I need to have a word with you about Ms. Bailey.”

  Emma went silently to her room. That night, she logged on to her computer and did some research. The next morning, she emptied the lipstick-shaped bank that her parents had stuffed with money and given to her on her last birthday (“for plastic surgery when you turn eleven,” they had said) and mailed every crisp bill to End World Hunger, a group that gave food to thousands of people around the globe.

  The next day at school, Emma found Principal Jenkins and got her to promise not to fire Ms. Bailey in exchange for an extra-fancy Chic-Chic hat.

  When Emma displayed no interest in fashion, Mr. and Mrs. Burblee were terribly displeased. When she gave her allowance to street musicians instead of spending gobs of money on makeup and perfume, they fretted and frumped.

  But what drove Mr. and Mrs. Burblee absolutely, maddeningly batty was Emma’s endless curiosity about food.

  Mr. and Mrs. Burblee regarded most food with horror and revulsion. Mr. Burblee liked nothing better than a tiny meal of carrots and water. Mrs. Burblee carried around a little vial of vinegar that she sniffed from if she had to pass a bakery or sweet shop. “Vulgar, nasty places,” she would mutter. If Emma was with her, Mrs. Burblee would force her to sniff from the vial as well.

  When Emma was four, the Burblees hired a fashionable cook named Mrs. Piffle to prepare their daily meals. Mrs. Piffle was a slim woman with sharp eyes and clawlike hands who ruthlessly banned anything that smacked of sugar or butter. She kept the Burblees on a strict low-calorie diet and forbade Emma from eating outside the home.

  Every time Emma came back from an outing, she was forced to stand in front of Mrs. Piffle with her mouth wide open. Mrs. Piffle would take a deep sniff, and if she detected even a whiff of candy or sweets, she sent Emma to her room without supper.

  On Emma’s first day of kindergarten, Mrs. Piffle handed her a small bag. “This is your lunch. You are forbidden to eat anything else,” she warned.

  Emma gave the bag a shake. It was featherlight. “What if my teacher gives me cookies for snack time? Can I eat them?” she asked.

  “Absolutely not!” Mrs. Piffle shrieked. “Cookies are for children with no willpower who grow up to be hideous blimps.” In a high-pitched voice, she crowed, “Remember, you’ll only win if you’re model-thin!”

  “Quite right,” Mrs. Burblee agreed, patting Emma’s cheek. “Have a lovely day at kindergarten, dear!” she called before flouncing out to go to Chic-Chic.

  When Emma opened the bag in the school cafeteria, she found a Tupperware full of bits of kale and cauliflower, cobbled together with a nub of cheese.

  “Eeew, what’s that?” asked a girl sitting next to her.

  Emma nudged a cauliflower bit. “I’m not sure.” She hungrily glanced at the girl’s peanut butter and jelly sandwich. “Want to trade?”

  The girl wrinkled her nose. “No! Gross! Your lunch smells funny. Hey, everyone,” she bellowed. “Come look at Emma’s stinky lunch!”

  “Oh, grooosss!”

  “Hey, aren’t you the kid who won’t eat cookies at snack time? You’re weeeeird!”

  “Is that alien food? Are you an alien?”

  As her classmates crowded around, Emma felt herself shrink lower and lower into her seat. Kindergarten was going to be a long year with Mrs. Piffle’s Tupperware lunches.

  One wintry day, Mrs. Burblee arrived home and tossed a wrinkled paper bag on the living room table. Emma, who was quietly gluing together a paper model airplane, looked up. Her mother was eyeing the bag the way a gardener eyeballs a slug chewing on his best head of lettuce.

  “Of all the most insulting things!” Mrs. Burblee cried.

  Mr. Burblee came out of the bedroom, adjusting his newest tie. “What’s wrong, dear?” he asked.

  Mrs. Burblee pointed a trembling finger at the rumpled bag. “What’s wrong is this unsightly Christmas gift Mrs. Finklepop just gave me!”

  “Who’s Mrs. Finklepop?” Emma asked.

  Mr. Burblee frowned down at his tie. “Isn’t she that woman who buys a Chic-Chic hat each week?”

  “That pudgy woman who buys a Chic-Chic hat each week
.” Mrs. Burblee shuddered. “I try to be extra-nice to her since she is a regular customer, but just look at the disgusting thing she gave me this afternoon!”

  Emma put down the glue and airplane and scooted over to the table. She opened the paper bag and pulled out a book. The Chocolate Lover’s Delight was written in gold cursive on the front.

  “A DESSERT COOKBOOK! THAT AWFUL WOMAN GAVE ME A DESSERT COOKBOOK!” Mrs. Burblee bawled. “She thinks I like to eat fat-stuffed, sugar-jacked, high-calorie filth!”

  “What a wretched woman,” Mr. Burblee said, fiddling with his tie.

  “Disgusting,” Mrs. Burblee agreed. She flounced over to Emma. With her index finger and thumb, she plucked the book from Emma’s hands. Holding the book as if it were a moldy grape, she carried it to the trash and dropped it in. “Emma, be a dear and take out the garbage. I can’t stand the thought of that book in my home for one more instant.”

  As Emma wiped her hands and got up, Mrs. Burblee marched to the bathroom. “I need a shower to rid myself of the vileness of touching that thing,” she announced, then disappeared.

  Mr. Burblee lifted his eyebrows, then went into the bedroom to work on his tie knot.

  Emma went to the trash bin and hefted up the plastic bag with the book. She carried it out of the apartment and into the hallway to the trash chute. She was just about to drop the bag into the chute when a nudge of curiosity got the better of her.

  She looked left and right.

  No one was there.

  The hallway was cool and silent.

  Emma sat down and reached into the trash bag. Her hand closed on the dessert book. With a quick tug, she removed it from the plastic bag.

  Nervously, she ran her fingers over the embossed gold letters on the cover. She opened the book to the first recipe. Her heart gave a tiny jump.

  She was staring at a photograph of a five-layered slice of chocolate cake, drizzled in icing and topped with a ripe red strawberry.

  Emma turned the page. It held a recipe for chocolate cream pie. Tiny sprinkles of grated dark chocolate floated on clouds of whipped cream that rested on a light brown bed of chocolate custard.