Alice Éclair, Spy Extraordinaire! A Spoonful of Spying

Sarah Todd Taylor's A Spoonful of Spying is a delicious Paris spy adventure for 9 year olds, starring a girl who bakes cakes all day and hunts enemy agents in secret.

What happens

Alice Éclair makes the most amazing cakes in her mother's pâtisserie. What her mother doesn't know is that Alice also works for France's secret network of spies. Her codename is L'Éclair, the lightning bolt.

It opens on a party boat on the Seine. Alice is dressed as a waiter, handing round canapés while she tails an enemy agent. It's all going to plan until a girl in a pink dress tumbles over the side. Alice saves her and misses the handover. But she does manage to pinch a strange little card, and it turns out to hold a clue.

The clue points to Daedalus, top-secret plans for a new plane. And the World Fair is about to open in Paris, with visitors (and spies) arriving from all over the world.

So Alice gets a stall in the food hall, where her mother is thrilled to show off their cakes. Alice's centrepiece is a model of the whole fair made from lemon biscuit and icing. It looks gorgeous. It's also her map.

Then an engineer and one of the agents go missing. Alice is sent to the fashion pavilion to find out why. Her plan to get backstage? Draw every dress in the show in chocolate, of course!

The baking is described so beautifully. Strawberry almond mousse, chocolate cake filled with orange ganache, glass roofs made of melted sugar. Your reader might well come away wanting to bake something.

But there's a proper spy story too, with codes, disguises and a whole cast of suspects. There's a model called Eva, an old lady dressed all in black and a designer wearing one pink shoe and one black. Alice is brave and clever, but she's also unsure of herself around the older spies. Claude, the glamorous agent she's working with, isn't easy to impress. When she frets about a failed mission, he tells her that saving a life always matters more.

Its full title is Alice Éclair, Spy Extraordinaire! A Spoonful of Spying.

What to read next

The story mentions an earlier mission of Alice's, aboard a luxury train called the Sapphire Express. If you'd like to read that one, it's A Recipe for Trouble. Alice has to sneak on board disguised as a pastry chef and work out which passenger is an enemy agent.