Weekend Cooking: Jolly Good Food by Allegra McEvedy

A while ago now I mentioned a Youtube TV series called Word of Mouth which seeks to combine a love of books and a love of food into one delicious package. In the course of one of the episodes one of the guest authors mentioned this book and I just had to go and get it from the library.

I have posted a couple of times over the year about how much I loved the Enid Blyton books, especially the Magic Faraway Tree books and the Wishing Chair books. I wasn't as fond of the Famous Five and never read the Malory Towers books, but those books where the children found adventures in other lands were amazing to me. Such good memories.\

I am not really the target audience for this book. It is really a children's cookbook, and the recipes reflect that, but it has been fun for me to take a look at as an adult.

The book is broken into six parts and each part includes a small snippet from the relevant books. There is Breakfast with the Naughtiest Girl, Elevenses in the Secret Seven's Shed, Picnicking with the Famous Five, Teatime Treats up the Faraway Tree, Suppers on the Secret Island and Midnight Feasts at Mallory Towers.

My favourite chapter was the teatime treats of course. Why wouldn't it be when the treats include Google Buns (back before google was google), Mother's Macaroons, Silky's Pop Tarts, Toffee for Moon Face, Clementine Treacle Tart and Raspberry and Vanilla Water Ice.

Below is a video of the author making Google Buns with her daughter

I thought though that I would share a page which is the recipe for the pop cakes so you can see the style of the book and the sheer fun of the illustrations

Silky was pleased. She sat there brushing her beautiful golden hair and ate sandwiches with them. She brought out a tin of Pop cakes, which were lovely. As soon as you bit into them they went pop! an you suddenly found your mouth filled with new honey from the middle of the little cakes. Frannie took seven, one after another, for she was rather greedy. 

Beth stopped her. "You'll go pop if you eat any more!"

As an aside, do you ever find yourself reading your own old blog posts. I do it with Weekend Cooking posts, but when I do find myself looking back at some of my old content I realise that I wasn't too bad at this book blogging thing back in the day. Not now, but never mind.

Weekend Cooking is open to anyone who has any kind of food-related post to share: Book (novel, nonfiction) reviews, cookbook reviews, movie reviews, recipes, random thoughts, gadgets, quotations, photographs. If your post is even vaguely foodie, feel free to grab the button and link up anytime over the weekend. You do not have to post on the weekend. For more information, see the welcome post.