Tag Archives | kids’ books i’ve been reading

The Fabulous Bake-A-Boy Challenge!

By on April 2, 2009 in books i've been reading, cooking, films, girl meets cake, kids' books i've been reading, other writers, telly

In honour of Heidi’s imaginary boyfriend in GIRL MEETS CAKE, here’s a challenge for you: why not make your own yummy gingerbread boyfriend? (Or girlfriend, or entirely platonic buddy who you might have a bit of a crush on…) Bake yourself a boy, decorate him in suitably delicious fashion, and send me a photo of the results – I’ll be putting up a gallery of your tastiest creations! Personally, I’m planning to make a Gingerbread Avon at my Publication Day tea party this weekend. Silver balls and black food colouring at the ready! Although now I think of it, a gingerbread Tenth Doctor might be quite cute…

Here’s my favourite Gingerbread Men recipe to get you started: they’re soft and bready, so cook them for a few extra minutes if you like them super-crunchy!

125g butter
100g brown sugar
125ml (half a cup) golden syrup (or half syrup, half black treacle)
1 egg yolk
375g plain flour
1-2 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp mixed spice
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda

Also needed: gingerbread man cookie cutter (or other shapes), rolling pin (I use a wine bottle!), baking sheets, wire rack for cooling – and whatever you’d like to use for decoration: icing, chocolate buttons, etc

  • preheat the oven to 180°C/350°F
  • beat butter and sugar together until pale and creamy
  • add the syrup and the egg yolk, and beat together
  • with a wooden spoon, stir in the flour, ginger, spice, and bicarb: then turn it onto a floured surface and knead until smooth
  • roll out until about 7mm thick, then place on a greased baking tray
  • cook for 7 minutes for soft gingerbread men, 10 minutes for dunk-them-in-tea-or-they’ll-break-your-teeth ones
  • cool on a wire rack
  • decorate! and don’t forget to snap a photo before he disappears! Email your photos to me here: susie at susieday.com

book_mini   I’m actually re-reading Virginia Woolf’s Orlando at the moment, which is covered in my studenty scribbles – but I didn’t get the chance to babble about MG Harris’ second Joshua Files book Ice Shock when I read the proof, and now it’s out! If you’ve been blinded by a neon yellow book cover lately, that’ll be the one – and the inside is every bit as striking. The first book, Invisible City, threw Josh into some uncomfy situations, but this time the sense of peril is relentless. After some very hairy moments locked in a cellar, Josh ends up hiding out back in Mexico with the magnificently unimpressable Ixchel, where he discovers that he might not just be in danger from the present, but the past as well. From night-time pursuits through freezing Oxford rivers to Lara Croft-style rock-hopping in a Mayan temple, all the way to the heartstopping ‘ice shock’ at the end, this is a top-notch thriller that is absolutely impossible to put down. Loved it!

pencil_mini Girl Meets Cake is officially out on Monday, wheee! So I’ve been rather busy giving susieday.com a cakey makeover (look! innit pretty!), and adding some new stuff for you lovely readery people. You’ll also see interviews with me popping up on a few YA sites soon (or you will, if I can whittle my answer to ‘What is your favourite cake?’ down to just the one paragraph). And in the meantime, I’m feeling increasingly gleeful about New Book, which is still just some ideas on a few bits of paper, but, you know, I think they might be good ideas…

rocrastination_mini watching Blake’s 7 (only the final episode to go, oh no!); inventing a new sandwich by accident (blue cheese on a cinnamon raisin bagel: somehow both disgusting and nice at the same time); loving In Bruges much more than I expected, and hating Watchmen much more than I expected; missing people who are far away.

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3 weeks till Cake!

By on March 16, 2009 in books i've been reading, cooking, girl meets cake, kids' books i've been reading, telly, the rugby isn't it

I’ve less than no idea how it got to be March, but apparently time does this ‘moving forwards’ thing while you aren’t looking.  Who knew?  I’ve also heard it rumoured that if you just sit completely still all through March, this thing called ‘April’ (like the girls’ name: crazy, huh?) rocks up to replace it, and with April comes the publication day of GIRL MEETS CAKE!  (And probably some rain and stuff too.  Sorry about that.  Still, GIRL MEETS CAKE!  Eeeee!  Woooo!  Noises!)

girl meets cake

It’s your average everyday story of love, lies, and gingerbread boyfriends – and I hope it makes you giggle.  Coo, it’s so pretty.  Every time I look at it, I want to snap off a chunk and eat it.  (Don’t consider that an author-recommended tactic, by the way: reading is definitely the way to go with this baby.)  And it’s going to be in actual shops from April 6th, so please begin making fluttery eyes at whoever buys the books in your house ASAP.

New book means you’ll be seeing a few changes around the site over the next few weeks, so do check back to see www.susieday.com after her makeover.  If you’d like to lay your hands on a free copy of Girl Meets Cake (not to mention a yummy basket of cupcakes!), then hurry on over to this fab Scholastic competition.  UK girlies, keep an eye out for Mizz magazine, for another competition with a rather exciting prize (for me as well as you!)…

book_mini  Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer: classic kidlit which I intended to reread for The Book That Never Was.  I recall adoring it when I was 11 or so: partly because I knew I was supposed to like this sort of thing (it’s all a bit Blue Peter), partly because the heroine’s last name is Makepeace, like her in Dempsey & Makepeace, which I loved with a flamey burny love.  To grown-up-me, it’s both brilliant and maddening: a clever tale of a time-slip, where two girls switch places between 1918 and 1960 and cope with fabulous phlegm – but also a missed opportunity, since the 1960s girl seems so Edwardian to the modern reader that the contrast in the two girls’ lives gets lost.  Sigh.  Still, the nostalgia made me giddy: a round bedpost that unscrews to reveal a hidden hiding place, monkey puzzle trees, ‘snubs to you and utterly squash’… *flails*  Also: Frank Cottrell Boyce’s Framed, a tale of thrilling juvenile art theft in North Wales which is beguiling, hilarious, and adorable all at once and should be read as soon as you can plausibly find a bookshop. Oh, and at last I can blether about M.G. Harris‘s Ice Shock, the second in her Joshua Files series, which manages to take everything you liked about the first one and then turn it up to 11…proper review next time, I promise!

pencil_mini  Surreally enough, I’m currently rewriting bits of Girl Meets Cake for the US edition – which will be called My Invisible Boyfriend, and available sometime in 2010.  Not Americanifying it: just tinkering with a thing or two to make the whole thing even more delicious (I hope!).  It’s a bit odd, being able to check different drafts against an actual proper book-shaped version, but I’m having fun dipping a toe back into Finchworld and reacquainting myself with geeky Heidi, and Mysterious E, and the endless references to cake…

rocrastination_mini  Baking blueberry muffins; eating scones with chestnut jam (yummy!) while watching Wales playing atrocious rugby; marvelling at how epically late 70s/early 80s telly fails even when it’s trying really hard to be feminist (Blake’s 7, I’m looking at you).

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The Book That Never Was

By on February 6, 2009 in books i've been reading, cooking, girl meets cake, kids' books i've been reading, other writers, telly

I mentioned I was scrabbling around for a suitable ‘work-in-progress’ title for my next book, and now, alas, I seem to have one – although The Book That Someone Else Has Just Written And Will Be Published Next Year Sometime, Thus Making Your Effort A Bit Pointless might be more accurate.  Catchy, eh?  Yep, the one thing that can absolutely scupper a book has happened: someone else has got there first.

But if I can ignore the petrol-flavoured grey Slush Puppie currently dribbled all over Oxford’s pavements because it was lovely pristine crunchy white snow before that, I can continue to look on the bright side:

  •  presumably it was quite a good idea for a book, then
  • I’ve found out now (at the outline stage), not 50,000 words too late
  • I get to read it, without the tiresome inconvenience of writing it first (and I don’t even know how this one ends!)
  • tomorrow, I’m going to eat some cake while thinking up some daft new idea to play with

Anyone wishing to contribute an inspirational random word (or cake) to facilitate the latter activity, please comment away.  Otherwise I might run with the female Mexican wrestling team who are actually undercover teenage spies.  In space.  I’m fairly sure no one’s written that one yet.

book_mini  I’m adoring and envying The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, to the point where I hardly dare pick it up again in case I accidentally finish it, and then it’ll be over.  Spooky, and funny, with a keen child’s-eye view for the peculiarities of the adult world (whether it’s peopled by the living or the dead).  And it just won the Newbery.  See, everyone else thinks you should read it too.  Go on, go on, go on…

pencil_mini  So, undercover wrestlers in space, right?  Meanwhile, Girl Meets Cake is still coming out in the UK in April, and apparently my US publishers are plotting… something. I like it when they do that. :)

rocrastination_mini  Devouring S1 of The Wire, which is every bit as remarkable as everyone has told you (grown-ups only, sorry); enjoying Slumdog Millionaire (though the first half is the best bit); perfecting my linguine gamberi; entertaining Extra Small Person and his lovely mummy, who should come back soon for more Pad Thai and learning how to roll over.

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I’ll have a P please, Bob

By on November 19, 2008 in books i've been reading, cooking, kids' books i've been reading, music, other writers, telly

Best thing about being a children’s writer?  Meeting readers – enthused, informed, very-probably-taller-than-me readers.  Second best thing?  Meeting fellow writers.  (They’re usually taller than me too.)  So the Oxford heat of the UK Kids’ Lit Quiz last week was a peachy way to spend an evening.  I got to join M.G. Harris, Linda Newbery, Dennis Hamley, Meg Harper, Mark Robson and Rachael Wing (who turns out to still be at school, doing her A2s: blimey, I bet she’s fed up of people mentioning that – but still, blimey!) on the Authors Team, up against 30 local schools.  Despite me apparently not knowing my Spiderwicks from my Snickets (oh, the shame), we managed to top the scoreboard.  But we did have 2 extra people and a combined age of, er, lots – so props to the true winners from Oxford High, and everyone who took part.  You all did scarily well, and I would like to have your brains, please.

book_mini  I’m whizzing gleefully through a sneaky preview copy of Ice Shock (gosh! ooh! no I’m not telling!), but I confess much of my week has been occupied with the Starksy & Hutch Annual 1979, which may be the best book I’ve ever read.  And I’ve read Ulysses.  Well, some of it.  If only Joyce had thought to brighten Bloomsday with bodgy drawings of men in cardigans, tips on keeping house plants, and the fact that Hutch is an Aries, I’m sure I’d have got all the way to the end.

pencil_mini  Lazy writer is lazy.  I’m sure all these pictures of Starsky wearing very short shorts will inspire me somehow, though.  Beloved British Editor has floated an interesting idea my way, though, which I’m quite excited about.  I shall reveal more when there is some actual ‘more’ to reveal…

rocrastination_mini Returning to my old college for a Women’s Dinner, to gossip with old friends and tutors, and delight in the fact that there are now enough women students to make such a thing possible (think there were 14 of us in my academic year?); cooking fajitas to Joe Cornish’s European Supermarket (cheers, Mr Smith); wishing the iPlayer could watch things for you, so as to save time.

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Ex-san-guin-ate!

By on October 31, 2008 in books i've been reading, doctor who, girl meets cake, kids' books i've been reading, telly

RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!  THE UTTERLY TERRIFYING DALEK PUMPKIN IS COMING TO GET YOU!

I trust this has put you in a suitably spooktastic Hallowe’eny mood, people.

Speaking of things Whovian (when am I not, let’s face it), evidently we’re getting a new Time Lord in the TARDIS come 2010, after David Tennant’s done a series of ‘specials’ next year. Good on ‘im, I say: we’re getting a new Exec Prod then too (Steven Moffat of Press Gang and writing that one with the statues fame: yay!), and I think the timing’s right. I got my regeneration anxiety over and done with after the scarred-for-life childhood experience of watching lovely fluffy Peter Davison turn into companion-strangling pantobeast Colin Baker, anyway. Now that‘s how to scare the kiddies.

Since the tabloids will now be all aflutter with speculation as to who’s Who next, I’m hoisting the flag for team Chiwetel Ejiofor.  Partly because it would annoy a lot of boring people: primarily because he would be bloody brilliant.  If not him, I’ll take Damian Lewis: ginger Doctor FTW!  And of course, we all know Joanna Lumley could pull it off.  What say you lot?

book_mini  Finally getting around to reading Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman, which is making me very glad not to live in the 1960s.  Although I may just have laid my hands on one of these, which might have to take priority…

pencil_mini  I’ve spent the last few days whizzing through the copy-edit of Girl Meets Cake, throwing in a tweak or two.  It’ll be off to the typesetters now, so they can rustle up proofs (and possibly do something deeply cunning with layouts).  I like this bit.  Probably because I don’t have to do any of it. :)

rocrastination_mini Flitting to Wales to catch up with Small Person, Even Smaller Person (though ‘small’ isn’t quite accurate: Fabulously Rotund Person?), and taller people, all of whom were absurdly lovely to see and none of whom were sick on me; getting cross with Raymond Blanc; painting my fingernails sparkly purple.

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