Way Too Much Challah Dough
In a story filled with echoes of "The Gingerbread Man" and other popular folktales, a Jewish kid bakes the traditional braided Shabbos bread for the first time. Because she uses too much yeast, the dough rises and rises until it covers the couch, crawls up the wall, oozes out the door, and runs away. The ending is a bit of a letdown: it was all a dream. But the lively, rhyming text makes for a fun read-aloud ("that dough kept on rising, each second, each minute / I must have put way too much extra yeast in it"), and the colorful double-page spreads depict the mayhem and mess that keeps spreading until the heroic rescuer, smiling bespectacled Bubby, arrives. Families will be interested in both the appended challah recipe and the brief note about the tradition of the braided bread.Hazel RochmanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved