Blog Tour + Excerpt + Review: "Making Whoopie" by Erin Nicholas

Today, I am very excited to participate in the blog tour promoting the release of "Making Whoopie" by Erin Nicholas, book #3 in the Hot Cakes series. This book reads as a complete standalone, making it perfect for readers (like me) who have not yet picked up the earlier books in the series. That said, I enjoyed meeting the characters from those earlier books through their appearances in this one, and plan to go back and read their stories as soon as I find the time.

"Making Whoopie" was a funny and sweet, yet surprisingly steamy, story that made me hungry for baked goods while giving me a new appreciation for the versatility of chocolate cake batter at the same time. ;-) I love a good marriage of convenience story, but they aren't easy to pull off in contemporary romance. The author did so quite well here IMO, choosing to focus on something simple and relatable - the need for health insurance coverage - to bring the main characters together, rather than being forced to marry to collect an inheritance or something else that is relatively less common.

The attraction between main characters Grant and Jocelyn (aka "Josie") was obvious from the start, and I liked how fun and playful their relationship seemed in spite of the circumstances that brought them together. They both had a lot to learn about love and relationships, particularly in the area of compromise, but the fact that both Josie and Grant were used to taking care of others meant that they had a lot in common. Grant always thought he knew best, however, and needed to learn that sometimes Josie (and others) could handle making their own decisions and it wouldn't be the end of the world.

Overall, I very much enjoyed "Making Whoopie" and would recommend it for all fans of contemporary romance. I look forward to the next book in the series!

*ARC provided by the author via Social Butterfly PR. All opinions expressed are my own.

About "Making Whoopie"

If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen...

Making Whoopie, an all-new not-to-be-missed marriage of convenience romantic comedy from New York Times bestselling author Erin Nicholas, is available now!

This marriage of convenience is about to get sticky.

Getting hitched for the health insurance is not Jocelyn Asher’s idea of romance.

But the hospital quote has really frosted her cookies, and suddenly, “I’m rich. We should just get married,” sounds a whole lot more swoony.

Especially when the man proposing is this gorgeous. And takes her to parties featuring champagne and petit fours. She’s a sucker for anything with bubbles or icing. And just like that she finds herself married to a near stranger.

Grant Lorre is usually allergic to spontaneity.

So why did he ask the beautiful small-town baker he had a one-night stand with to marry him? Somehow watching her lick batter off a whisk--not a euphemism--made a wedding and a little fraud seem like a sweet idea.

They’ll just play house and make some whoopie--pies, of course--for a few months and then move on with their separate lives. Until then, bring on the cream filling. And that is a euphemism.

But as things heat up even outside of the kitchen, they quickly realize there’s no recipe to follow when it comes to love.

Read an Excerpt from "Making Whoopie"

No one fell in love over cheesy potatoes.

That was ridiculous. There was nothing sexy about cheesy potatoes. Or potatoes without cheese, for that matter.

But lust? Well, that was a possibility. Apparently.

Because watching Grant Lorre eat cheesy potatoes across her best friend’s mother’s dining room table was making Jocelyn Asher hot.

Of course, Maggie McCaffery’s cheesy potatoes were award-winning. Seriously. She’d taken home the purple ribbon four times from the Dubuque County Fair and twice from the Iowa State Fair. And Grant seemed to agree that they were delicious. He’d made a sexy groaning sound when he’d first taken a bite, and Josie had been mesmerized as his lips closed around the tines of his fork. Never mind how her heart rate had picked up when he’d turned the fork and licked it.

She was a mess. Purple ribbon or not, Josie was pretty sure that getting worked up over watching a man eat potatoes meant she was hard up.

She took a long drink of iced tea and tried to remember the last time she’d had sex. If she wasn’t forgetting anyone—and how sad would that be—the last time had been with Ben Davis. After Kara Davis’s, now Tibbin’s, wedding.

Last week Kara had been into Buttered Up, the bakery where Josie worked with her best friend Zoe, to order a miniature version of her wedding cake to celebrate their first anniversary.

Josie sighed. That had to explain the sexy potato thing going on across the table. It had to.

But then Grant laughed at something Aiden, his best friend and Zoe’s fiancé—yes, it was one big happy group at this table—said, and Josie felt her neglected lady parts clench. Yeah, it wasn’t the potatoes.

Thankfully.

Kind of.

As weird as getting turned on by potatoes might be, it might have been preferable to being turned on by the man who had been coming into the bakery nearly every morning for the past two weeks, but hadn’t so much as asked her to have a cup of coffee with him.

He’d asked her if the blueberries in the muffins were locally sourced. He’d asked her if they had any gluten-free cinnamon scones. He’d asked her for a lemon slice for his cup of hot water. But that was pretty much the extent of the things he’d asked her over the course of the time they’d known each other.

Oh, and he’d caught her when she’d fallen off a ladder. Twice. Very gallantly.

He’d swept her up before she’d hit the floor. Like a freaking knight in shining armor.

But both times he’d simply set her on her feet and gone on with his day.

She, on the other hand, was now getting hot and bothered by side dishes.

***