Franny K. Stein 9 – Recipe for Disaster

Jim Benton's Recipe for Disaster is a deliciously silly story for 7 year olds about a school bake sale that gets very, very out of hand.

What happens

Franny's friends Mona and Vincent are trying to raise money for the school's art and music departments. The trouble is the baking. Mona's blueberry muffins look like giant poisonous mushrooms (Franny actually asks if she made them that way on purpose).

At first Franny isn't sure art and music matter as much as science. Then her friends point out that somebody had to draw all the diagrams in her science books. And doesn't music make her monsters less bitey? Fair point, she decides.

Her own baking goes badly too. So she does it her way. She turns the school's old furnace into a giant steel robot baker with every recipe on Earth in its brain, and she calls him the Muffin Man.

His muffins are irresistible. Properly irresistible. Within days the whole school is mobbing the bake sale, kids are eating muffins instead of their lunches and the new instruments sit unopened in their boxes. Even Igor stops listening to Franny, which is when you know things are serious.

It's a very funny read and it's stuffed with baking puns (Luck Has Muffin to Do with It is a favourite). The Muffin Man is a brilliant baddie too, because he isn't really bad at all. He was a furnace who could never get the school's temperature right for everyone, and now he's found something that makes every kid happy. Or so he thinks.

There's a gentle idea tucked in there about what really makes people happy, and it never gets preachy. Franny has to beat this one with her brain rather than a big fight, which makes the ending very satisfying.

One bit might tug at soft hearts. Near the end Igor gets a glimpse of a lonely future without Franny, and a child who loves dogs may want a cuddle at that page. It's over quickly and he's fine.

Its copyright page puts it ninth in the Franny K. Stein series, and you don't need the others first.

What to read next

If they're after more of Franny at school, The Invisible Fran has Miss Shelly's class bringing their hobbies in. Franny can't see the point of stamp collecting or Irish dancing, so out come a two-headed robot and an invisibility potion.