Mystery #21: Claudia and the Recipe for Danger
My favorite thing I learned from this book is that Stacey got Claudia a charm for her charm bracelet in the shape of a credit card, to symbolize their love of shopping. Stacey’s an absolute legend; thank the Lord Harry Styles she’s back in the BSC and friends with Claud again!
Anyway, a baking competition is coming to Stoneybrook and several BSC members enter: Logan on one team with his sister Kerry and Austin Bentley, and Claudia and Mary Anne with Shea Rodowsky (who, you’ll remember, Claudia has a special bond with). Meanwhile, the BSC has been asked to run a daycare center for the contestants’ children, and Kristy will get to be a Cake Cop (making sure no one breaks the contest rules… which is basically her wet dream).
Apparently Kristy fails right off the bat, though, because both Claudia and Logan’s teams get sabotaged — someone’s swapping flour for baking soda, messing with oven settings, swapping out eggs with hardboiled eggs, etc. It could be a contestant, a parent, who knows? At first Claudia suspects Mari and Grace (because they’re friends with notorious BSC nemesis Cokie Mason) but then someone swaps out their cornstarch with baking powder and causes their oven to catch fire, so… yikes.
Meanwhile, Jackie Rodowsky keeps wandering away from the daycare center and returning with white powder all over him. So is he tampering with the ingredients??? (Relax, everyone, he’s probably just doing cocaine.) Nah, he’s trying (unsuccessfully) to make his own cake. Claudia catches him and tells him to please go back to daycare and try to rein in his disaster-ness until the competition is over.
Claud, Mary Anne, Logan, Austin, Grace, Mari, Shea, and Kerry have a meeting of the minds and figure out that people were sabotaged relative to when they’d done well in the competition. For instance, Grace and Mari were sabotaged the day after they’d won a round. So whoever is doing the sabotage is paying attention to the judges’ scores and also has access to everyone’s workstations. (What if it’s the host just drumming up publicity or intrigue? What if it’s KRISTY, trying to play hero Cake Cop??)
Okay, so I was joking about it being Marty the host, but it turns out it was actually him. He was trying to rig the contest for his girlfriend Julie, who snuck into the under-sixteen competition to try to please/help her restaurateur parents. I’m just an accidental genius. Call me Janine. And call Claudia Nancy Drew (or maybe Velma?), because she concocts a plan to catch the culprit red (er, white — covered in flour) handed. Oh, and Claudia, Mary Anne, and Shea win the contest and the $1,000.
One gripe: Claud, M.A., and Shea made this supposedly amazing cherry chocolate cake recipe that was Mary Anne’s mom’s recipe, and then no one thinks to include this recipe in the book??? Rude AF.
