Alice Éclair, Spy Extraordinaire! A Recipe for Trouble

Sarah Todd Taylor's A Recipe for Trouble is a cake-filled spy story for 9 year olds about a Paris baker's daughter who sneaks out at night to catch traitors.

What happens

By day Alice helps her mother in their pâtisserie. Her Eiffel Tower cake has spun-sugar fireworks and tiny iced stars (she can never leave a cake alone). By night she's working through a pile of anonymous notes that have been training her to be a spy.

Her latest mission sends her into the mayor's mansion dressed as a maid. She practises first by piping a map of the building in icing on the shop counter, then smearing it away. Who wouldn't want to plan a break-in that way?

The mission leads to a bigger one. An enemy agent is travelling south on the Sapphire Express, the grandest train in France, carrying papers that could help a dozen enemy spies slip into the country. Nobody knows who the agent is. The only way on board for a thirteen-year-old is through the kitchen.

So Alice talks her way into a job as the train's pastry chef, with a biscuit model of the train and some very quick icing. The full title is Alice Éclair, Spy Extraordinaire! A Recipe for Trouble, and the trouble arrives fast. One chef clearly wants her gone. The maître d' will put her off the train if her pastries aren't good enough. And a chatty English girl at the station is being suspiciously helpful.

The fun of reading it is that the cooking and the spying never stop getting in each other's way. Alice is crouched in front of an oven willing her puff pastry to rise while the passengers she's meant to be watching board without her. She's brave and clever and a tiny bit pleased with herself. Grown-ups never notice her, and she's very good at using that.

"Trust no one" is the rule the notes taught her, so every passenger is a suspect. Your reader gets to play along and guess.

If you've got a reader who loves a mystery on a train, or who spends the Bake Off final shouting at the screen, this is a lovely mix of both.

What to read next

For another mission with the same whisk-wielding heroine, try A Spoonful of Spying. This time Alice is serving canapés on a party boat on the Seine while keeping an eye on a man who's passing secrets.