Michael Rosen poem Chocolate Cake to become picture book

Puffin Books, a division of Penguin Random House (PRH), will this year publish a picture book of Michael Rosen’s poem, 'Chocolate Cake'.

'Chocolate Cake' originally appeared as a poem in the anthology Quick! Let’s Get Out of Here! published by Puffin in 1985, and a video of Rosen performing the poem has received more than three million hits on

Commissioning editor Anna Barnes acquired worlds rights to publish the poem as a picture book from Charles Walker at United Agents. She said: “I couldn’t be more excited to be publishing Michael Rosen’s laugh-out-loud poem 'Chocolate Cake' as a picture book for the very first time. It’s got all the ingredients of a read-aloud classic: thanks to Michael’s incredible YouTube performance the poem is already a favourite for millions of families.”

Rosen is one of the UK’s most popular children’s book authors. His most successful title is We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, which last year was one of only two books (the other being Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar (also Puffin) that notched up 1,000 weeks in BookScan’s Total Consumer Market Top 5,000.

Chocolate Cake will be illustrate by Kevin Waldron, who is represented by Paul Moreton at Bell Lomax Moreton, and published in hardback on 3rd August.