Rachel Campbell Deddens wrote The Day the Calf Ate the Chocolate Cake as a tribute to her daughter, Margaret, who loved visiting the family farm where Rachel grew up. Raised in Amherst County, Virginia, Rachel now lives in Lynchburg, where she enjoys reading to her two grandsons and hopes they will enjoy reading about Margaret's childhood adventures. She is a graduate of Randolph-Macon Woman's College, a local historian with twenty-plus years in the museum field, and a culinary historian with a self-published guide to open-hearth cooking, and two self-published children's books, one a tribute to her son, Jonathan.