Recipes from Roll with It

Roll with It by Jamie Sumner

Roll with It, by Jamie Sumner, is a great middle grade read about a young girl finding her passion and her people. Twelve-year-old Ellie, who has cerebral palsy, feels like she has to start over from scratch when she and her mother move from Nashville, Tennessee to a small trailer, in a small town in Oklahoma with Ellie's grandparents. Her mother worries that her new, small school won't be able to give Ellie the support she needs to be successful and they are both concerned about how best to help care for Ellie's grandfather, whose Alzheimer's Disease is becoming more of a challenge each day. While initially thrown off guard by the offer of friendship from her quirky neighbor Coralee who dresses in eye-catching ensembles (like her velvet Christmas dress with puffed sleeves up to her ears) and unsure about Bert, another kid in her new neighborhood who carpools with them to school who is building his own miniature of their town in the shed behind his house, Ellie soon discovers that true friendship means supporting each other for who you are, not who you think you should be.

One of Ellie's favorite things to do is bake and many recipes are mentioned throughout the book, but the following three recipes are pivotal to the story. A few of these are even the exact recipes that were shared in the book! Click on the recipe titles or images below to find the full recipes totry them at home.

Challah Bread

Photo credit: smittenkitchen.com

This bread was a crowd pleaser for Ellie's friends and family, and she mentions smittenkitchen.com by name in the book, so you know this is the EXACT recipe she made, too! Ellie says that making bread is "like the final exam of baking," and that this bread is even better the next day as French toast. Yum!

Snowball Cookies

Image credit: Southern Living

These snowball cookies (also known as almond snowballs, Mexican wedding cookies or Russian tea cake) that Ellie found in a 1989 holiday baking issue of Southern Living were the perfect introduction of her baking prowess to her classmates at her new school. While she's nervous about her baking presentation, she decides that she will "do something I'm good at, even if nobody else cared." With their coating of powdered sugar they are messy, but they're such a hit that "all that's left when the container gets back to me is a little pile of powdered sugar."

Blackberry Lemon(ade) Pie

Image credit: letsdishrecipes.com

While Ellie's blue ribbon Blackberry Lemon Pie was a recipe of her own creation, using Julia Childs' pie crust recipe, canned blackberries from her grandparent's garden and her grandfather's favorite lemons, there's no reason that you can't try your hand at this delicious blackberry lemon(ade) pie, or another pie of your own creation, just like Ellie!

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Baking is a great way to share your love with family and friends, and, in Ellie's case, develop something you're passionate about and really enjoy! As Ellie says, "I'm my best self when I'm baking. I'm patient and I'm not nervous and I'm good at it. And so now I'm trying to be great at it."

Do you have any recipes that you love to share with those you care about? Or is there something else that you do that you feel makes you your best self, like Bert with his miniatures or Coralee with her singing?