Week 6: Fired Up By Food

Welcome to week 6 of our Make Stories Like Roald Dahl summer challenge. This week we will explore Roald Dahl’s love of fantastic food and wigglish words to invent a scrumptious treat of our own.

Roald Dahl absolutely loved food. He adored chocolate and even tested new bars for Cadbury while he was at school. As an adult he wrote Roald Dahl's Cookbook with his wife, Liccy. It’s jam-packed full of mouth-watering recipes and tales of delicious meals with friends and family (not forgetting a chapter on chocolate)!

But Roald Dahl was also really inventive with food in his stories. From Bruce Bogtrotter’s epic cake to Willy Wonka’s lickable wallpaper, he took everyday food like fruit or chocolate and used a sprinkling of imagination to turn it into a lip-smacking edible surprise.

The wallpaper has pictures of all these fruits printed on it…When you lick a strawberry, it tastes of strawberry. And when you lick a snozzberry, it tastes just exactly like a snozzberry…

Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Once Roald Dahl had cooked up a tasty treat he had lots of fun giving it an exciting name. He enjoyed playing with words and used them just like ingredients – he chopped them up and mixed them together to make new words, like the BFG’s snozzcumber. ‘Cumber’ might make you think of cucumbers, but ‘snozz’ definitely sounds like something much more disgusterous!

A more mouth-watering concoction with a tongue-tingling title is Willy Wonka’s Whipple-Scrumptious Fudgemallow Delight chocolate bar. Sadly we can’t eat one, but I wonder if we could work out some of the secret ingredients from its name? Perhaps some fudge, marshmallows and whipped cream? Delicious…

Family challenge

Create your own fruity fizzbanger ice lollies. You’ll invent flavours and names, just like Roald Dahl did!

You will need:

• A pen and paper
• Ice lolly moulds (or clean yoghurt pots, lolly sticks, tin foil and scissors)
• A selection of chopped fruits
• Lemonade, fruit juice or squash

First invent your flavours.

1. Make a list of the fruit and drinks you could use in your lollies.
2. Choose two or three different ingredients to mix together.
3. Blend part of each ingredient word to make a new one (think snozzberries). We used kiwi, melon and strawberry to make mewiberry. We used raspberry, blackcurrant and lemonade to make raspcurrantade.
4. If you’re feeling fancy, turn your food word into a full name for your lolly. How about a Marvellous Mewiberry Mess? How about a Ruby Raspcurrantade Ripple?

To make your lollies…

1. Arrange your fruit in the lolly moulds or pots. You could muddle it together or make layers.
2. Pour in your lemonade, juice or squash. Leave a bit of space at the top though!
3. Place the lolly stick holder on top. If you’re using yoghurt pots, a square of tin foil over the top with a slit in it will help to keep the lolly sticks in place.
4. Freeze your lollies for 4-8 hours.

Don't forget to share!

You should now have fruity lickable lollies worthy of Willy Wonka’s factory! Write it, draw it, act it out or just tell us about it using #MakeStoriesLikeRoaldDahl.

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With Rachel, our Collections Manager and Archivist