Back to School with Betsy Page 7

  "So am I," said Betsy, as Billy put the pan in the oven.

  "Well, let's have some cornflakes and milk while we're waiting for the cream puffs to get done," said Billy.

  The children sat down at the kitchen table. They each ate two bowls of cornflakes with milk. Billy, meanwhile, was reading the cookbook. Suddenly he looked up. "Hey, Betsy!" he said. "This cookbook is crazy."

  "What do you mean, 'It's crazy'?" asked Betsy.

  "Well, it says here, 'This recipe will make twelve good-size cream puffs or thirty-six small ones,'" Billy read.

  "It's crazy," said Betsy. "It only makes two."

  When the children finished their cornflakes, Billy said, "I guess we better look at them. It's been fifteen minutes."

  He opened the oven door and the two children stooped down and looked inside. To their astonishment, there in the oven sat two golden pumpkins. They were the cream puffs, all blown up and six times as big as an ordinary cream puff and eighteen times as big as a small cream puff.

  The children's eyes looked as though they were about to fall out onto the kitchen floor.

  "Golly!" cried Billy. "I didn't know that they were going to blow up like balloons."

  "Jimminy!" cried Betsy. "I'll bet we've made the biggest cream puffs that were ever baked..."

  CAROLYN HAYWOOD (1898–1990) was born in Philadelphia and began her career as an artist. She hoped to become a children's book illustrator, but at an editor's suggestion, she began writing stories about the everyday lives of children. The first of those, "B" Is for Betsy, was published in 1939, and more than fifty other books followed. One of America's most popular authors for children, Ms. Haywood used many of her own childhood experiences in her novels. "I write for children," she once explained, "because I feel that they need to know what is going on in their world and they can best understand it through stories."