2023 Johnson County Fair

Seven years. 

It's hard to believe that it's been seven years since I last competed multiple baked goods entries in the Johnson County Fair. Where did the time go?

I started competing in county fairs in 1990. It took me 17 years to win my first Grand Champion ribbon. I won that in 2007 with a decorated cake. That was also the first year I entered the Indiana State Fair and that same decorated cake won the Sweepstakes (now called Best of Show) for non-professional decorated cakes. After that, it was like I had broke the dam, figured out the game, and I started winning... alot. But with that winning also came alot of pressure to do it again, and again, and again... until it wasn't fun any more... because once you win it all there's no where to go but down.

I won both the Grand Champion and Reserve Grand Champion placings in Baked Goods in both 2015 and 2016 at the Johnson County Fair. In 2017 I decided I didn't want to do it anymore. I had swept the placings for two years in a row and it seemed a good time as any to stop. So, for the first time in 27 summers I did not enter the county fair. I didn't miss it so I didn't participate in 2018 either. In 2019 I had a beautiful crochet afghan I wanted to enter but I would be in Europe during the duration of the fair. Since items have to be entered within a year of completion I went ahead and dropped it off for entry and then had a friend pick it up and drop it off at the state fair. That afghan won Class Champion in Crochet at the Johnson County Fair and Best of Show at the Indiana State Fair. There was no fair in 2020. In 2021 I spent the summer revenge traveling like everyone else. In 2022 I entered one Baked Goods item. It was supposed to be peanut butter fudge but something went wrong with the consistency and it turned out more praline-like than fudge-like, so I pivoted and called it a peanut praline bonbon... and won Class Champion in candy... because I know how to play this game.

This year though, I got the itch. I wanted to enter a couple things. Just a couple... but you know how that goes! Three turns into five, then five turns into eight, etc.

So here was my original plan. I had a couple categories I entered for the state fair. County fair was going to be a dry run of sorts for the state fair. In reality, baking multiple items for the county fair is actually more difficult than baking multiple items for the state fair because for state the drop off days are spread out over the course of days to weeks. For county though, everything is due in on the Friday and Saturday before the fair starts on Sunday. I know some people bake things ahead of time and freeze them but I can't do that. I think things taste best within 24-48 hours of it being made so I always bake the day before the drop off deadline. I needed to practice my timimg.

Here is how my Friday went...

Up at 7am. Put my sourdough starter out on the counter. Made coffee... LOTS of coffee, and had breakfast.

Put four sweet potatoes in the small upper oven to bake.

Cooked a pound of bacon and reserved the grease.

Made the yeast dough for my Loaded Potato Rolls using the bacon and bacon grease and set it in the proofing box to rise for an hour. This is also a State Fair entry and I hadn't made it in a couple years.

Divided and fed my sourdough.

Made the Chocolate Espresso Stout cake batter and put it in the lower oven to bake. This is also a possible State Fair entry. I've made it before as a 9" 3-layer cake. Baking has gotten alot more expensive though so I wanted to make 6" cakes instead and I halved the original recipe. I wanted to make sure the cake baked the way I thought it should, plus I wanted to see if I needed to adjust the baking time.

Once I start using the oven I like to keep things going in and out so I don't have to repeatedly heat up the oven. I made the dough for my molasses cookies and had 8 cookies ready to go as soon as the cakes were done. The molasses cookies are my husband's favorite cookies but again, I hadn't made them in several years. I bake my cookies 8 at a time. You have to show 6. I make 8 and taste the jankiest looking one. If it tastes fine and the others are all uniform in shape I pick the 6 best ones and move on. The rest of the dough gets put back in the fridge or freezer for later. If I need to make any adjustments this also leaves me dough to do that. The other thing I discovered is that if you bake an entire recipe's worth of cookies while baking multiple items you will eventually run out of space and flat surfaces are a premium on baking day!

Sweet potatoes were also done by now so I pulled them out to cool and shut the upper oven off.

I have a range with 2 ovens - a smaller upper oven and a full size lower oven. In years past I've run both ovens at the same time but that makes for total madness with the timing and I wasn't up for that this year, nor did I think I needed to do that. Some years I've had so many entries that "oven time" itself was a premium and I've had to run both ovens - i.e. put a pie to bake for an hour in the lower oven and bake cookies in the upper oven - but not this year.

Cakes came out, cookies went in. 8 minutes. They came out looking a bit flat so I but the dough in the refrigerator to try again later and moved on. 

By now my yeast dough was blowing the top off its container so I got that out and shaped my rolls. The recipe makes 24 rolls and I put them on 3 baking trays. The trays don't fit in the proofing box but on a hot summer day the back of my SUV makes the perfect proofing oven so out to the car they went.

Next I made Coffee Toffee cookies. This is a new recipe. It sounded good. It's a shortbread cookie so I planned to enter it in the shaped/molded/cut-out cookie category. I initially used a flower shaped cookie cutter but the sharp edges didn't hold up while baking and the toffee bits oozed out of the edges. I tried again with a circle cutter. Still not what I wanted but I didn't have time to deal with it so I shoved the rest of the dough in the fridge and moved on.

I peeled and pureed the sweet potatoes while the cookies were baking.

Next up was Brown Sugar Sweet Potato Cornbread. This is a new recipe I want to enter in the State Fair. I was super super happy with how it looked when it came out of the oven and I couldn't wait to try it. For the County Fair I only need to show half the product. That means I can taste the other half.

Tried the molasses cookies again. They still looked flat but tasted fine so I decided I was done playing with them.

By now the rolls were done rising so I baked them next. Each tray took 15 minutes. I try my best to clean as I go so I mainly spent the baking time washing and drying bowls and the blender. I then had a small heart attack when I found this on the counter top...

Because it looks very similar to this...

The cheddar cheese powder is used in the Loaded Potato Rolls and was already in my cabinet. Surely to Christ I would have smelled the difference when I used it!?? Ugh. I anxiously waited for the rolls to bake so I could taste one. Plus, it was mid-afternoon by now and I was starving.

Rolls came out. I tasted one. It was fine. Phew!! Had a roll and a salad for lunch.

Next was the Sweet Potato Spice Cake. I made this once before for the State Fair in 2015 and won the Any Other Cake category. The recipe makes a 3-layer cake and you have to enter the whole cake at the State Fair so I've never tasted this cake. The Johnson County Fair though specifies a 2-layer cake for the Spice Cake category so I wanted to make this and taste the layer I didn't enter.

I made the batter for Strawberry Cardamon cupcakes while the spice cake was baking. I entered the Strawberry Cupcake Contest at the State Fair so this was a new recipe I was trying out. Spice cakes came out of the oven looking great and cupcakes went in. 6 cupcakes. 30 minute bake time. I make 6 cupcakes at a time for the same reason I bake 8 cookies at a time. I need to show 3 cupcakes.

Cupcakes came out looking beautiful. Perfectly domed but not overflowing and thoroughly baked. And then I tasted one. Dense, dry, doughy, basically inedible. I tried to fix the remaining batter by adding some oil for the dryness and some whipped egg whites for the denseness. 6 more cupcakes, another 30 minutes. Still inedible. I poured the rest of the batter down the drain. Strawberry cupcakes are not happening this weekend. I did keep the inedible cupcakes though because there is a decorated cupcake category and I figured I could salvage them for that.

Coconut Stuffed Fudge Brownies were next. I've made this recipe quite a few times recently but never competed it. They baked without a problem.

By now it was almost 8pm and time to feed and divide the sourdough again. I'm making Caramelized Onion and Parmesan Biscuits for the biscuit category but it requires sourdough discard as one of the ingredients. I also am of the opinion that biscuits only taste good when freshly made so I planned to make them first thing Saturday morning, however I needed the discard.

I don't remember eating dinner. I might have had another roll and a piece of cornbread. I cut that cornbread and tried it. It was delicious!

I started checking off the things I had left to do and it seemed like all I had left was to ice both cakes and decorate the inedible cupcakes... plus I had to make sure I had a recipe typed and printed for each item, and everything had to be plated and packaged for transport.

The chocolate buttercream icing was next. I absolutely love this icing but it's hard to make. I think cakes should be beautiful but tasty at the same time. Icing and decorations should be just as tasty as the cake. I don't decorate with fondant or royal icing because no one likes it. Seriously, who eats fondant? It all gets peeled or scraped off, right? This chocolate buttercream on the other hand... you can eat it plain by the spoonful. It's hard though because you have to boil a sugar water syrup to 242 degrees F. Then you have to whip some eggs in a bowl and pour that boiling hot syrup into the eggs, all while continuing to whip the eggs so they cook but don't scramble. It's especially hard for me because I no longer have a stand mixer. That means I'm holding a hand mixer with my right hand and pouring boiling hot syrup with my left hand... and trust me, hot syrup spatters when you pour it into a bowl with the mixer going. Anyhoos, icing got made, but by the time it was made, my kitchen was HOT due to the oven being on all day so I had to put it in the fridge so it wouldn't ooze off the cake as I spread it.

I have a love hate relationship with buttercream. It's my preferred frosting but the temperature has to be JUST right to spread or pipe properly. Get it too cold and it's a solid chunk. Too warm and it won't hold its shape. It is mostly butter after all.

Fifteen minutes in the fridge, then I was able to ice half the cake before I had to put everything back in the fridge again. I had to do this a couple more times before I got everything smooth and looking how I wanted. I didn't even bother with piping anything decorative because it was just too warm.

Whipped frosting for the spice cake was next. This is another favorite frosting recipe. It's not too sweet and actually looks and tastes quite a bit like whipped cream but is fair legal - meaning allowed. Food safety regulations at the fair state you cannot use any uncooked milk, cream, cream cheese, heavy cream or eggs in your frostings and fillings. The chocolate buttercream is legal because you are cooking those eggs with the 242 degree syrup as you are whipping them. On the other hand, if you make your buttercream with confectioners' sugar and butter and then thin it with a little milk, that is not fair legal.

My whipped frosting recipe starts with boiling milk and flour together until it looks like mashed potatoes, then adding it to a whipped butter sugar mixture. You have to constantly stir the flour milk mixture on the stovetop as it cooks so it doesn't scorch or get lumpy. By now, my feet were absolutely KILLING me! I actually had to go get a bar stool to sit on while I stirred. Plus, since I hadn't made this in awhile, I forgot to slowly add the milk to the flour to make it perfectly smooth before heating so I ended up with tiny lumps in my mixture. I thought maybe those little lumps would beat out when I added them to the butter sugar mixture but they didn't. Arghhh! The frosting tasted fine; it's just you could see little balls of cooked flour suspended in the frosting when you spread it. Crap. It was nearing midnight, I was tired, and I did not want to make the frosting again. Think, think, think. I needed to disguise those little lumps. They kinda looked like chopped nuts...

I stacked two layers of cake and but only masked the sides with frosting. This would be a "naked" cake. I frosted the top but then covered it with chopped walnuts. DONE.

I wanted everything pretty much ready to go in the morning so I went ahead and sliced onions and cooked them on the stovetop to caramelize them next. This took another 15 minutes and I started typing up recipes while doing this.

Now it was way past 1am. I thought about blowing off decorating the cupcakes and going to bed... but I just couldn't. How long could this take, really? I grabbed some confectioners' sugar with a couple tablespoons of pasteurized egg whites in bowl and started stirring... adding water and confectioners' sugar until I got the right consistency... which turned out to be alot easier said then done because it was freakin' HOT in the kitchen. I FINALLY got it right and piped icing on five cupcakes, then picked the three prettiest ones to show.

Took a shower and went to bed... at 4 am.

Rolled out of bed at 7am and made my biscuits.

Finished printing out all my recipes and packaging the items while they cooled, then packed the car and left for the fairgrounds at 9am.

Turn in was from 6-8pm on Friday night and 9-11am on Saturday morning.

I always go early Saturday morning because the temperature is cooler in the morning. I got all my entries dropped off and back home by 10:30 am. However, while driving back, I suddenly became worried because I didn't drop off a recipe with my decorated cupcakes entry. I knew for a fact that the cupcake recipe was not required because you could decorate a styrofoam dummy if you wanted, however I didn't know if they wanted the icing recipe or not. Ultimately decisions like these always come down to who is judging and how strictly they adhere to the rules... and the rules did not seem to make any exceptions in the recipe requirements for the decorated cakes class. I would be upset if my entry got disqualified for not having a recipe... so, so I could sleep at night, I quickly typed up the royal icing recipe and drove it back to the fairgrounds.

Now I was really DONE.