The Worldwide Dessert Contest

Dan Elish's The Worldwide Dessert Contest is a gloriously silly story for 8 year olds about a chef whose apple desserts keep turning into other things.

What happens

John Applefeller loves making apple desserts. He's entered the Worldwide Dessert Contest every year for ten years and come last every single time. Not second to last. LAST.

Why? Because his desserts change at the last minute. His apple soufflé puffed up into a giant balloon. His apple ketchup turned into red house paint (he sold it to paint the local primary school, so it wasn't all bad).

This year he's made an apple pancake ten feet wide. With his ten-year-old assistant Stanley and his little horse Morocco, he wheels it into the stadium.

The contest is wonderfully bonkers. The champion, Sylvester Sweet, arrives on an elephant in a purple tuxedo with nuts for buttons. The head judge has had a caramel apple stuck to his cheek for ten years (guess whose dessert that was?). And one reporter keeps demanding that everyone give it to him straight.

What does the pancake turn into? Let's just say the queue to have a go on it gets VERY long!

Then a scruffy old janitor shouts that the greatest dessert chef ever is Captain B. Rollie Ragoon, who makes magical apple pies. And Sweet goes pale...

It's pure silliness, the kind you'll probably want to read aloud. But it has a big heart too. Applefeller keeps going while the whole crowd laughs at him, and Stanley never stops telling him to ignore them. Any child who's kept at something they love while other people giggled will be rooting for him.

A couple of the rival chefs are played for laughs with put-on foreign accents, which reads as a bit dated now.

What to read next

If it's the sweets that got them, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is in the library too. Charlie gets one bar of chocolate a year, on his birthday, and has to walk past shop windows piled high with it every day.