Young children who like cooking can enjoy the combination of story and recipes in Eddie’s Kitchen and How to Make Good Things to Eat by Sarah Garland (Frances Lincoln, £11.99.) With its lively illustrations, this is the perfect way to introduce a five- or six-year-old to helping make a few simple but satisfying dishes.
A more ambitious book for the older age group is Get Cooking (Walker Books, £9.99) by Sam Stern, ‘the world-famous teenage cook,’ which contains a tempting selection of straight-forward but mouth-watering recipes. Serious fans of the books of Jacqueline Wilson can test their knowledge in Totally Jacqueline Wilson (Doubleday, £12.99) which contains quizzes, information and four new stories.
Finally, if you want to keep the children laughing over the festive season, there are two excellent paperback stocking-fillers which should do the trick. Cressida Cowell’s series of the memoirs of Hiccup the Viking are funny, outrageous and will lure in the most reluctant reader, with a welter of exclamation marks, capital letters and wild drawings of Hiccup, his father, Stoick the Vast, his teacher, Gobber the Belch, and a full cast of other eccentric Vikings and their dragons, including Hiccup’s useless Hunting Dragon, Toothless. The latest in the series is How to Twist a Dragon’s Tale (Hodder, £5.99). Horrid Henry, with his manic pin-point eyes, is a favourite fiend in many families, and his latest adventures, Horrid Henry’s Christmas Stocking by Francesca Simon (Orion, £9.99) is in a double pack with Horrid Henry’s Jolly Joke Book. They will probably be funnier than the ones in the crackers.
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