Roald Dahl Day: Willy Wonka's Nutty Crunch Surprise

Today is Roald Dahl Day! Roald Dahl is one of the most beloved storytellers of all time. His many popular children's books include Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, The Witches, and Matilda. He died in 1990.

And here's an odd chocolate fact about him: He loved chocolate, but not chocolate cake or chocolate ice cream.

So in honor of Roald Dahl's birthday, I'm posting a recipe for Willy Wonka's Nutty Crunch Surprise from Roald Dahl's Revolting Recipes, illustrated by Quentin Blake with photographs by Jan Baldwin (Viking, 1994) Recipes compiled by Josie Fison and Felicity Dahl.

According to Felicity Dahl, "Treats were an essential part of Roald's life--never too many, never too few, and always perfectly timed . . .  Revolting Recipes is an interpretation of some of the scrumptious and wonderfully disgusting dishes that appear in Roald's books."

Willy Wonka's Nutty Crunch Surprise

Lost Chapters from Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

With the 50th anniversary of Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,  there's a new release from Penguin UK that contains several previously unreleased chapters that were edited out of the early draft of the original book. Vanity Fair has obtained an exclusive unpublished chapter in Dahl's own hand entitled "The Warming-Candy Room."

From Vanity Fair:
In “The Warming Candy Room,” three boys neglect to heed Mr. Wonka’s warnings and eat too many of his soft-centered “warming candies,” and end up “bursting with heat.” The boys do not appear elsewhere in the book, betraying a key characteristic of Dahl’s writing process. “One of the things that was quite interesting about Dahl was that he didn’t really look backward over his work,” Sturrock explains. “It’s not as if this was just the one missing chapter; there are many bits and pieces of the book that fell along the wayside. Once he decided that something wasn’t working, he just moved on.”

Read more about the chapter Here.

Also don't miss "The Vanilla Fudge Room," another left-out chapter from an early draft, that the Guardian published last month. New illustrations by Quentin Blake.

There's also a redesigned cover of Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, that Penguin UK is bringing out for the 50th anniversary of the book.  Personally it's not my cup of tea or bar of chocolate! What do you think?