The Garbage Pail Kids Cookbook

Elisabeth Weinberg and Matt Stine's The Garbage Pail Kids Cookbook is a gloriously gross cookbook for 9 year olds, where the recipe names are revolting and the food underneath is perfectly normal.

What happens

Recipe after recipe is introduced by one of the Garbage Pail Kids. Nasty Nick is a vampire who'd much rather bite into snot than blood, so his garlic knots come with a bright green cheese sauce for dunking.

Dung Beetle Baily hands over his Tasty Turds, which turn out to be peanut butter, oat and raisin bites. Walter Melon's Moldy Melon Fries are just watermelon sticks rolled in chopped pistachios so they look fuzzy and rotten.

That's the running joke. The name makes your reader squeal and the ingredients list is honestly quite sensible (there's a vegetarian chilli, and a broccoli stew with cheesy "eyeballs" bobbing in it).

The recipes are grouped into snacks, lunches, main meals, sides and puddings. Each one has proper numbered steps. Before any of that, Handy Sandy does the kitchen safety page, and she's a terrible example who knows it. She cracks her eggs with a lucky hammer!

Then she tells your reader to keep a grown-up close for knives, the oven, the hob and the blender, and to tie long hair back. There's a glossary of cooking words too, so "simmer" and "knead" don't come as a shock halfway through a recipe.

Who's going to love this? Probably the child who laughs hardest at the word "bogey". Luke Puke calls himself the Sultan of Spew, and Diaper Dan admits his filling looks like a messy number two. If that makes you wince, you'll know already. If it makes your reader cackle, they'll be desperate to get cooking.

It's an American book, so you'll be converting a little. Quantities come in cups with grams alongside, and ovens in Fahrenheit with Celsius beside it. You'll meet graham crackers and all-purpose flour (plain flour does the job). Some recipes need planning ahead as well. The jelly worms for Apple Cory's salsa have to set in bendy straws for at least eight hours.

It's a brilliant excuse for a Saturday afternoon in the kitchen together, with plenty of giggling at the names along the way.

What to read next

Adam Bomb, Rob Slob and Handy Sandy have stories of their own too. In Welcome to Smellville the gang are at the school science fair, and Rob Slob's display of "strange minerals" is not what his teacher thinks it is.