The Magic Cake Shop

by Meika Hashimoto

  “She sounds lovely,” said Albie. “Please go on.”

  “I inherited my mother’s love of making sweets, so when I grew up, I went to the Culinary Arts School in Athens to become a pastry chef,” continued Mr. Crackle. “While there, I participated in the most prestigious competition a baker can enter—the annual Supreme-Extreme Master of the Kitchen Contest. It is over one thousand years old, and the winner is declared the most talented chef in the world.”

  Emma polished off her last bite of sandwich. “Albie told me you won the Supreme-Extreme contest before moving to Nummington.” She frowned. “Why does it have such a funny name?”

  Mr. Crackle sighed and rose to clear the table. “It used to be called the Grand Prix du Gâteau, but fifty years ago there was a very close match between François Dupin from France and Hank Smith from America. Hank won. François was a powerful man, and he was so miffed over losing that he got the French government to forbid the competition to be named in French. Hank was given the honor of renaming the competition. ‘Supreme-Extreme Master of the Kitchen’ was what he chose.”

  Cups and plates in hand, Mr. Crackle walked to the sink and turned on the water. “Apparently it was a great name for publicity. The competition used to be known to only a handful of experts who dedicated their lives to the culinary arts, but about ten years ago, a television producer caught wind of it. A year later, Supreme-Extreme Master of the Kitchen went on the air. I’m afraid it’s now more about pizzazz and showmanship instead of the art of good cooking, but it’s still a grand way of finding talented master chefs.” He began to soap and rinse the dishes.

  “Anyway,” he went on, “many years ago, well before the Supreme-Extreme was put on television, I entered the competition and won. I got a sizable chunk of money, but after the hoopla was done and everyone went home, I was pulled aside by the judges, all previous Supreme-Extreme winners. They showed me the true prize of the contest.”

  “And what was it?” asked Emma.

  Mr. Crackle beamed. “A key to a door that opens into a most marvelous shop! Inside the shop are jars filled with spice combinations unlike any flavors you have ever tasted! Each bottle is created from the combined knowledge of all past great bakers who discovered the most exquisite blends of flavors.”

  By now Mr. Crackle had stopped washing dishes and was dancing. He continued, “Take pumpkin pie spice, for example. It is a precise proportion of cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, and allspice that does wonders for bland pumpkin. Now think of jars upon jars upon jars of spice combinations that make cookies burst with flavor, pies and tarts sweet and delectable; then think of the creative chef who combines these spice combinations and—voilà!—you have incredibly complex and beautiful flavorings unmatched by anyone except those with access to this shop.”

  “Sounds marvelous!” Albie got up and started to jig along with Mr. Crackle. Emma laughed and joined them.

  “And that’s only half of it!” Mr. Crackle said. “The other half of the shop is filled with the rarest ingredients in the world, found in places as deep as magma beds located thousands of miles underground or as far up as outer space! One of my favorite ingredients is moon sugar. I put it in my chocolate truffles for just the right sweetness.”

  Emma stopped dancing. A worm of a thought had just occurred to her. “This is very interesting, Mr. Crackle, but you don’t have much time to make the elixir. What does the spice shop have to do with the recipe we need to make?” she asked. “And why do we have to go down the flour barrel?”

  “Ah, there’s a reason why I knew you’d be an excellent assistant, Emma! Sometimes I do get carried away when it comes to baking. It’s good for you to remind me that we have a task at hand.”

  Mr. Crackle stopped dancing and lowered his voice. “Most of the ingredients in the recipe are found only at the spice shop. And the flour barrel is how I get there. Every Supreme-Extreme Master has a portal installed in his or her kitchen. I’m not sure about the physics of it, but one day a few men came into my kitchen, fiddled with the flour barrel, and now there’s a little ladder that leads down to a door. I open it with a little key, and—ta-da!—I’m in the shop!”

  “But, Mr. Crackle, why do you need us for this recipe?” Emma asked. “It sounds like you can get the ingredients and stuff for yourself!”

  “Frumping fiddlesticks! I forgot. You two haven’t seen the recipe yet.” Mr. Crackle went over to the bookshelf where the recipe lay curled up. He unrolled the parchment and smoothed it out on the table.

  “Take a look,” he said.

  Emma and Albie craned their necks to read the writing. Here is what they saw:

  ELIXIR OF DELIGHT

  Created by Alexus Mastivigus for

  His Lord Highness Emperor Fuddlykoo

  Makes anything taste delicious

  Servings: 200

  Squoil 2 burberry beans

  A curled-up squid, 5 guzzle spleens

  Masher 10 whingbuzzit legs

  A sack of sogs, 3 biddle hegs

  Frizzle the mizzle of a jug-jug tree

  Skizzle the spizzle of a shick shack shree

  Clunch and glunch and sklunch and zunch

  10 tooby tibs of timtam tea

  Squinch a wibbly cobbyseed

  Splinch a skibbly hoppy mead

  Add a splash of juice, then dash

  A flib of fribs into the stash

  Crix the bits and scrips together

  Then go outside and check the weather

  If it’s raining, catch six drops

  Add them to six gobs of trops

  In sunny weather, catch a ray

  And shine it in three bloobs of blay

  Mirp and moil, krisk and kroil

  Return to heat and let it boil

  Then add the gloamy foamy ball

  Of a chixed-up, fixed-up spider shawl

  Slommer till the liquid’s brown

  Cool until the temp goes down

  2.6.3 degrees

  (Make sure the middle does not freeze)

  Plat into a spiky hat

  Twill three times, then quickly splat

  The mixture through a tickler’s thread

  (One dyed bricky bracky red)

  Finally—and this is key—

  Add lifflets from the Timtim Sea

  Until the buds of mobbly molds

  Turn glowing glinting haunting golds

  Then you’ll know you’ve got it right

  You’ve made the Elixir of Delight

  Well done! Hooray! Yippee! Yip-yay!

  Put on your happy pants today!

  But, oh, beware the witchy hour

  When potent powers turn sickle sour

  Good shall turn from bad to worse

  For those that taste at Creeker’s curse.

  Emma and Albie looked up. Mr. Crackle was beaming at them. “You see? You two are crucial to the creation of this elixir! You are the mobbly molds!”

  Albie puzzled his eyebrows. “Mr. Crackle, what’s a mobbly mold? And how do you squoil a squid? Or do any of these things in this recipe? It’s all a bunch of made-up verbs and nouns that don’t make sense!”

  Mr. Crackle frowned. “Oh dear, I keep forgetting that most people don’t know chef-speak. After spending my entire life using both ordinary and obscure cooking terms, I don’t remember what is and isn’t common English. Here, let me show you something.”

  He went to the bookshelf and removed an enormous volume with a wrinkled leather cover. He placed it on the table in front of Emma and Albie. On the front, in gold spidery lettering, was The Encyclopedia of Eccentric Baking Terms.

  “This book contains rare cooking definitions that have fallen out of practice in the last few hundred years. Take a look at this entry.” Mr. Crackle riffled through the crackly yellowed pages and found the one he wanted.

  mobbly mold (n) maw-blee mohld

  (AD 98–187) Mobbly Mold was a doctor and scientist who discovered why children often change their minds about what they like t
o eat.

  The tongue has millions of taste buds. Each bud tastes one of four distinct flavors: sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. Mobbly Mold found that in children, these buds cluster around the exact center of the tongue in an area no bigger than a grain of sugar. This area is called the taste explosion center. See diagram below:

  Space is tight, so the different buds battle one another to control the child’s sense of taste. One day the sweet buds might win and the child will eat sugar uncontrollably. Another day the bitter buds triumph, and a child might eat almond skins like mad.

  On a child’s eleventh birthday, the taste explosion center explodes and the buds migrate over the tongue—sweet buds go to the tip, sours head back near the tonsils, salties stay in the middle, and bitters settle on the sides.

  At this point, the buds have enough room so they stop bickering with one another, and the eleven-year-old begins to develop tastes that will last a lifetime.

  In very rare cases, the taste explosion center does not explode and a person cannot, for the rest of his life, make up his mind what in diddly-squat he actually likes. This is called tasteritis, the most famous case being that of Emperor Fuddlykoo of Tuptiddy City.

  A child under eleven whose taste explosion center has not exploded is referred to as a “mobbly mold” in chef-speak.

  “Huh,” mused Emma. “So that explains why I keep changing my mind about creamed spinach.”

  Albie wrinkled his nose. “Creamed spinach—ugh! It’s always horrible. Creamed mushrooms, though—I never know if I’m going to like them from one day to the next.”

  Mr. Crackle closed the book and returned it to the shelf. “As you see, both of you have an enormous role in the creation of the Elixir of Delight. Each of you is a mobbly mold while your taste explosion center is still intact. Since the elixir recipe says ‘mobbly molds’—as in more than one—I’m assuming that I need at least two children under eleven to try out this potion, and I figured you two would do just fine. Once we get the potion right, the exact center of your tongue should turn a beautiful, sparkling gold. Now, I think it’s time we got started. Let’s pop downstairs and figure out what ingredients we need.”

  Mr. Crackle went to his desk and opened a drawer. After plucking out a sheet of paper and a pen, he motioned for Emma and Albie to follow him to the kitchen.

  Back downstairs, he gave Emma the pen and paper. “Could you write down the ingredients I tell you?”

  Emma winced. “I don’t have very good handwriting.”

  “Pish. My handwriting would make a nun weep. I’m sure yours is better.” Mr. Crackle went to the large cabinet and swung open the doors. He lifted his index finger to the top left and gently moved it across the rows of ingredients. As he contemplated the hundreds of clear, neatly shelved bottles, Emma and Albie stood beside him and looked at some of the typed labels:

  MOONBEAM EXTRACT

  ESSENCE OF BUBBLE FLOWER

  WATERFALL CREAM

  BABBLEBERRY JUICE

  FIREROCK POWDER—CAUTION: FLABBABLE

  “What in flames is flabbable?” asked Albie.

  “Flammable. The m on my typewriter wasn’t working the day I labeled my firerock powder, so I had to improvise.” Mr. Crackle paused over a nearly empty bottle. “We need biddle hegs.”

  As Mr. Crackle checked the recipe against his stock of ingredients, he called out the ones they needed to buy. Emma wrote down “biddle hegs, burberry beans, a curled-up squid, gobs of trops, guzzle spleens, skibbly hoppy mead, sogs, the spizzle of a shick shack shree, a tickler’s thread, whingbuzzit legs, and a wibbly cobbyseed.”

  She hoped she had spelled their names right.

  “That should do it, except for the spiky hat, which neither the spice shop nor I have,” said Mr. Crackle as he glanced at the recipe a final time. “We’ll have to make it ourselves. Harrumph. I’ll probably poke myself grumpy.”

  Emma jumped. “I don’t think so—my parents gave me a prickled hat as a going-away present. It has cactus spines and everything.”

  Albie looked aghast. “Your parents gave you that cactus-prickled hat for a going-away present?!”

  Emma shrugged. “Mom and Dad said prickles are all the rage in Paris.”

  Mr. Crackle said slowly and carefully, “Emma, your parents are nitwits.”

  Emma smiled. “Thanks, Mr. Crackle.”

  “Now then. Let’s get this recipe cracking. Here’s the plan. You and Albie nip off to your uncle’s house and grab your prickled hat. While you’re there, you might as well bring that wooden backpack box you use for your uncle’s desserts. Some of the ingredients we need must not be squished or they’ll explode. In the meantime, I’ll see what I can do to translate this recipe into understandable English. And do please be speedy. I believe I can no longer taste the hint of peanut butter that was sticking on my tongue not a minute ago.”

  “We’ll be back in half an hour,” Emma declared.

  “Tops,” promised Albie.

  They grabbed their coats and hurried out the door as Mr. Crackle went upstairs to consult The Encyclopedia of Eccentric Baking Terms.

  Emma and Albie raced down the main street, up the dirt driveway, and into Uncle Simon’s house. As they entered, they heard Uncle Simon and Maximus jabbering away in the living room. Albie tiptoed to the kitchen pantry, while Emma crept to her room. She crouched next to her bed and found the loathsome birthday hat in the darkest, dustiest corner. Gingerly she picked it up and immediately pricked her fingers. Gritting her teeth, she placed the hat into an empty cardboard box. When she exited her room, she found Albie, who had hauled the dessert box to the porch. “Let’s go!” he whispered.

  Emma got ready to hitch the box over her shoulders, but suddenly she stopped.

  She was staring at a pair of hunting boots and pointy white shoes on the front porch.

  Her fingers smarted. Her mind whirled.

  She opened the shoe box full of prickled hat. She carefully broke off a couple of spines and dropped them into Uncle Simon’s boots and Maximus Beedy’s shoes.

  Albie gave a quiet giggle. “That’ll get them hopping.” He peered into the shoes. “Hang on—those prickles won’t do any pricking lying flat. Let me spike them up a bit.”

  Emma grinned. “I’ll keep an eye out,” she whispered.

  “Will do,” Albie whispered back.

  Emma crept over to the living room window and took a quick peek inside. She saw Uncle Simon lounging on the couch in front of the television, stuffing himself with mashed liver and a box of chocolates. His bulging eyes were riveted to a show on meat marinades. Maximus Beedy perched stick-straight on a chair next to Uncle Simon. With one hand he dipped a small cloth into a jar of polish for his cane. As Maximus turned the cane, it reflected the sun onto the television screen.

  Uncle Simon snapped, “Beedy, if you don’t stop moving that blasted cane and interrupting my program, I will move it somewhere where it won’t be so shiny. Like the garbage disposal.”

  “Obviously you have no sense of style, Simon,” Maximus hissed. “This cane is made out of the finest rare metals brought up from the bowels of the earth. I polish it with a combination of crocodile wax and the tears of small orphans. Most people would sell their grandmothers for a cane this lustrous.”

  Uncle Simon finished his liver and chocolate with a gulp. “Lustrous or not, it’s bugging the nose hairs out of me.”

  “Which wouldn’t be a bad thing,” Maximus sneered.

  Uncle Simon stood up. “Maximus, you are becoming a most unwanted houseguest. I do hope your little scheme doesn’t take much time,” he snarled, “because if it does, the only thing shiny you’ll have is a shiner of a dented eye.” He shuffled toward the door. “I’m going to check my rabbit traps. When I get back, you had better be done polishing your cane.”

  Emma glanced back at Albie. He was still crouched next to the shoes, delicately arranging the prickles in them. “Uncle Simon’s coming!” Emma whispered urgently.

  “Give me
one more minute!” Albie whispered back. “I’m almost done!”

  Emma burst into the house and ran down the hallway. She flung open the living room door just as Uncle Simon was about to open it. He burped in surprise as she bustled in and slammed the door shut.

  “Made the elixir yet, brat?” Uncle Simon barked. A small piece of chocolaty meat flew from his mouth and landed on Emma’s shoe.

  Emma kicked it off with a jerk. “Not yet. I needed to get the dessert box for Mr. Crackle.”

  “Going to make a magical elixir with an oversized box? You must be dimmer than I thought.” Uncle Simon guffawed.

  Behind them, Maximus gave a cry of rage. The spit-and-chocolate-covered meat Emma had flicked had landed on the tip-top of his cane. “Simon! Something foul has just landed on my cane and ruined my afternoon’s worth of polishing! Ugh! It smells like your lunch!”

  Uncle Simon arched an eyebrow. He walked over to Maximus, plucked the chewed-up bit, and popped it into his mouth. “Waste not, want not!” he purred.

  Maximus’s eyes burned. He lifted his cane and twisted the top gently into Uncle Simon’s enormous gut. “One day, Simon,” he said slowly, “I may cure you of your love of food.”

  “Sticky buns and rat rubbish!” snorted Uncle Simon. “Impossible!”

  Maximus twisted a little more. “Once we’ve made our fortune, I suggest you watch what you eat. You never know when a little poison might slip into your meat.”

  Emma decided it was a good time to make her exit. “Bye, Uncle Simon! See you tomorrow!” She left Uncle Simon and Maximus glaring at each other and darted out of the room. Albie was standing on the front porch with the shoe box. He winked. “All set!”