Kathryn Littlewood - Rose Bliss Cooks up Magic

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books 2015

HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd,

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Text copyright © 2015 by The Inkhouse

Cover illustration © Laura Ellen Anderson

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

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Source ISBN: 9780007451784

Ebook Edition © 2015 ISBN: 9780007451791

Version: 2015-05-06

For Katherine Tegen, who makes magic with books

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue: Whatever Will Be, Will Bee

Chapter 1: The Cat’s in the Bag

Chapter 2: Making the Mostess of a Bad Situation

Chapter 3: FLCP

Chapter 4: The Moony Pye of Insatiability

Chapter 5: In an Apricot Jam

Chapter 6: Cheesy Home Videos

Chapter 7: The Bunny and the Hag

Chapter 8: Gorging on Glo-Balls

Chapter 9: Two Brothers, with Sprinkles

Chapter 10: Little House on the Tarmac

Chapter 11: Dinky Doodle Doughnuts of Zombification

Chapter 12: On the Wings of Squirrels

Chapter 13: King Things of Revulsion

Chapter 14: Love Is in the Jars

Chapter 15: A Dinky Bit of All-Consuming Greed

Chapter 16: Skirting the Issue

Chapter 17: Let’s Give the Boy Eight Hands

Chapter 18: Boys Do Cry

Epilogue: Lady Rosemary Bliss

Keep Reading

Acknowledgments

Also available

About the Publisher

ROSEMARY BLISS’S DREAMS had come true.

She was the most famous baker in all the world. She was the youngest chef ever to have won France’s famed Gala des Gâteaux Grands. She was the twelve-year-old girl who’d out-baked celebrity TV chef Lily Le Fay and stopped her aunt’s nefarious schemes. She was the local kid who’d saved her hometown and rescued the Bliss family’s magical Cookery Booke .

So why wasn’t she happy?

On the thirteenth morning after returning from Paris, she got up and pulled open the curtains of her bedroom.

Snap. Flash. Click. Click.

That was why.

“Look, up there, it’s Rose!” Click. Flash. Snap. “Rose, how do you feel about your victory?” Click. Flash. Flash. Snap. “Rose! How does it feel to be the best baker in the world?” Snap. Flash. Click. “And at only twelve years old?” Click. Flash. Snap .

Ugh, Rose thought. They’re still here . Gone were the soothing sounds of morning, the wind chimes, the rope of the tire swing creaking against the branch of the old oak outside her window. Instead, the new sounds came courtesy of the group of paparazzi that had taken up permanent residence outside the Follow Your Bliss Bakery. Each morning they waited for Rose to open her curtains and then snapped hundreds of pictures, while calling out for a quote about her prodigious victory.

Rose had always harboured a secret curiosity about what fame would feel like, and now she knew. It felt like being a goldfish: hundreds of big googly eyes staring in at you, leaving you nowhere to run and nowhere to hide, except maybe a little plastic castle.

Rose snapped the curtains shut, and wondered if she’d had enough of baking. It wasn’t worth it, not if it meant this .

“I wish I never had to bake again,” Rose said to no one in particular.

A furry grey head, its ears flattened, appeared from a mound of dirty clothes at the foot of her bed. “Be careful what you wish for,” Gus said. “Wishes before birthdays have a strange way of coming true.” The Scottish Fold cat raised a paw and began licking carefully between each sheathed claw.

“That’s just silly,” Rose said. “My birthday isn’t until the end of summer. Anyway, I didn’t really mean it.” She scratched his head and he purred. “I’d just like to not have to bake for a little bit, you know?” She’d become a baker because she loved her family and her town, and baking was in her blood – but thanks to her victory at the Gala des Gâteaux Grands, everything had been turned upside down.

She knew it had only been a measly two weeks, but the past fourteen days had been the longest of her life. No peace and quiet. No time to enjoy the summer. Baking wasn’t fun anymore; it was something she was expected to do – like homework.

And that was no fun at all. As far as Rose was concerned, unless something changed this summer, she was done with baking for good.

Downstairs, inside the kitchen of the Bliss Family Bakery, the situation was no better. Camera flashes burst through the drawn curtains like stuttering flickers of lightning, and the barking of reporters outside the door made it sound like there were a thousand people outside instead of just a few hundred. Why wouldn’t they leave her alone?

The mail was almost worse.

Rose’s brothers, Sage and Ty, were already sitting in the bakery kitchen, tearing through yesterday’s mail, throwing the unimportant letters into a giant black trash bag and placing the ones that needed answers in a pile. Rose knew the letters were for her (“Your fans love us – I mean, you,” Ty liked to say) but she was tired of having to read them. She didn’t want to look at another letter now – or ever. She just wanted to get back to a normal life.

“Junk,” announced Sage, throwing a stack of balled-up paper into the trash. Rose’s pudgy-cheeked younger brother had just turned ten, but he didn’t look a day older than eight. He had curly, strawberry-blond hair, and the only thing that had grown on him over the past year was the number of freckles on his nose.

“What was in it?” asked Ty. Rose’s handsome older brother had grown, but not enough – lately he had confided in Rose that he was worried that his dreams of NBA superstardom were out of reach.

“The prime minister of Spain wants a cake,” Sage said, flipping through the letters, “Warren Buffett wants an enormous pie-chart pie, with a different flavour for every section.”

“What’s a pie chart?” Ty asked.

“Who’s Warren Buffett?” Rose asked.

“Some nobody who likes pie, I guess,” Sage said, and read another letter. “The United Nations General Assembly wants us to make a cupcake for every ambassador for their next meeting – frosted with the country’s flag, and – listen to this – ‘the flavour of each ambassador’s homeland in every single nibble.’”