Remember the chocolate chocolate chip cookie recipe I have been refining and making for years? Well, I am entering it in the County Fair. You know, the County Fair, the one with kiddie rides, pig wrestling, and ending with the raucous Demolition Derby.
My goal is to attain official Renaissance Woman status. Not only do I live the life I live, but I can make a wicked cookie!
I meant to enter last year, but didn’t follow through. This year, my latent competitive nature erupted and I am entering the best cookies ever made: two versions. One includes chocolate chips for the Chocolate Chip Cookie class, and the other is chipless and will compete in the Drop Cookie class.
I took great pains to make them just right, even sifting the lumps out of the sugar. It was great fun; I found myself laughing at myself more than a couple times at the silliness of the whole thing. The chipless cookies first: bake ten and enter the best six (six are required). They had to be entered on paper plates; fortunately we had some old ones lying around in a drawer.
I tried a new strategy to find the balance between getting them cooked through, but not letting them crack nor collapse much. To get an idea what other than taste might be considered by the judges (no doubt County Extension Office agents, 4-H leaders, and former Future Homemakers of America members), I read about how flowers are judged, including things like “cultural perfection”. Translated to cookies, I take that to mean they look perfect as well as blow the socks off of true chocolate lovers. I hope the judges appreciate full-blown chocolate, and are not stuck in the rut of traditional chocolate chip cookies.
To my dismay, they came out a bit bigger than normal, so my plates were too small. Bummer, as I’d glued a short stack together to make a plate sturdy enough for my cookies.
Off to Safeway I rode on my trusty town cruiser. I decided to maximize my chances of winning by selecting the plates tastefully trimmed with a Patriotic theme, to prove that I am a full blooded Patriot Woman, which should appeal to the County Fair crowd (what could be more American than the County Fair?). My keen sense of competitive strategy easily accepted this disingenuous move in the name of winning (something… anything!).
So I arranged the six cookies on the their respective plates, sacrificed shiny new ziploc bags to each, and packaged them up. To protect my precious entries, I decided to walk over rather than pedal, carrying the plates wrapped in a towel. Soon into my walk, I realized that the warmer cookies were on the bottom. I peeked. Alas! Four of the six were squished. Intolerable, certainly no longer Fair worthy. I turned around. Fortunately, I had some dough left in the fridge. I also devised a new technique for packaging: invert the remaining plates over the cookie plates.
Entering was interesting in itself, and not because they lost my pre-registration form. I got in line behind a kid entering the Refrigerator Art class, and was followed by a man pushing a wheelbarrow with a bale of sweet scented hay. Gotta love the County Fair.
It was also interesting trying to get information about when the judging results would be available, versus when the entries would be on display, and when one could pick them up. Clearly these three older gals assumed I had some idea of how things work (including Fair language). I felt like a dork! As I pressed for the hours they are open and found that almost none fit, they asked me what I do. When I told them I work as a climbing guide, they kept looking at me with no particular expression, and said nothing. But my cookies looked great.
I think next year I’ll enter the Demo Derby.
Cookies Part 2, a week later.
Funny that after entering, I found myself surprisingly invested in how they fared in the competition! But I reminded myself to keep my perspective and just enjoy the fact that I entered.
One day I returned from work and my wonderful housemate Krissi told me she visited the fair exhibition hall, and saw a plate of my cookies with a ribbon. Cool! Soon she told me the ribbon was blue. She didn’t see the other plate anywhere, but confirmed that this one actually had my name on it.
Days later I was able to get over there and indeed found the blue ribbon plate: the drop cookies (no chips) as expected instead of my non-traditional entry in the chocolate chip class. But then I found my plate of choc choc chip cookies also with a blue ribbon! How cool was that?
Then I looked around a bit more carefully at the shelves covered with numerous types of sweets. Among the many blue ribbons were others in the exact same classes as I’d entered. In fact, there were 7 entries in the choc chip cookie class, five of which had blues, and the remaining 2 were awarded red ribbons. Both drop cookies entries sported blue ribbons. Hmmm.
What kind of competition was that?!
I took some photos (excluding, of course, the OTHER blue winners), then pedaled back home. A curious call to the Fair office revealed that they judge using the Danish System. Huh? In the Danish System, each entrant is based on it’s own merits. Oh. How progressive!
So I am competing against myself. How sweet! But I already KNEW I had ass-kicking good cookies…
But at least now I have not only one blue ribbon, but two, to prove my homemaking talents in addition to the rest of my skills. Good thing I didn’t get any red ribbons! Look out, Martha Stewart.
Well, the Danish System is much easier and faster for the judges, and cheaper for the Fair, esp as the ribbons do not have the year printed on them. And given that taste preference varies so much among people and the lack of prescribed qualities for each kind of cookie, it really does make sense.
It turns out that ‘yes’ the entries were available for recovery after the Fair ended, but only until 2pm the next day. I arrived the following morning (the first time I’ve been off during their hours).
I was able to pick up my ribbons, but my cookies had been thrown out. What a crime!
On my way into the now-empty Exhibition Hall, I passed a trash can overflowing with Fair detritus. Realizing my little treasures were probably in it, I began excavating. Dying flowers, wilting lettuce, banana bread and many other sweet delights still wrapped on their plates… Ouch! Rose stems. More cookies, but not mine even down at the bottom. All this compostable material going to the landfill!
Further sleuthing revealed one more trash bin on the other side of the room. My cookies were near the top, five left of the original six per plate, in nearly perfect condition. Yea! I also snagged a pecan pie.
I walked out of the place once again laughing at myself, this time for digging through the trash for my silly cookies (and taking the pie). Just a bit of rinsing and the sticky-dessert-goo on one of the plastic bags disappeared, leaving my packaged cookies still quite presentable, patriotic-themed plates and all.
I kept a few of the choc choc chip cookies, and then combined the rest onto one plate to bring in for the office folks whom I had told of my ribbon the day after Krissi had seen that I won. Of course I had to add Official Legitimacy by attaching one of the ribbons to the plate!
The computer guy at our office is collecting video footage of each of us talking very briefly about anything. When I showed up with the cookies, he pulled me aside to get me on video showing off my little treats and the bright blue ribbon. Quite silly… and fun for all.
Despite being a week+ old, in the office, the cookies were short-lived. I neglected to mention that I got them out of the trash.
In case your county fair is competitive, here is the recipe so you can enter them and see what how well your local judges appreciate chocolate:
Set the oven at 350 degrees
In a large, thrift-shop bowl, combine:
A stick of butter (softened, and best if organic)
1 cup white sugar
½ cup dark brown sugar (no lumps!)
Add: 2 eggs (organic)
½ tsp vanilla
And beat it well.
Then add:
1-½ cups unbleached white flour (organic)
1 cup cocoa powder (organic)
¾ tsp baking soda
½ tsp salt (distilled from the ancient seas on Mars)
Once that is all mixed, throw in a bag of bittersweet chocolate chips.
Get your hands oily so that you can roll the dough into little round balls about 1-¼ inch diameter without it sticking too much, then set the balls on the pan, squashing them only enough so they won’t roll off when you pick up the pan.
I like how the cookies come out best when the dough has been refrigerated (which I do so that I can make them fresh weekly or so!). If the dough is cold, you can roll the little balls without having much dough stick your hands. When the dough is room temp, the cookies will be larger (as with what happened when I made them for the fair) and less tall. This way, they have less surface area so are even more moist and tasty.
I bake them for only 7 minutes. This is enough to be cooked (as verified by local County Professional Cookie Experts), but also enough that you can later put a couple in the microwave for 12 seconds and have them hot and gooey all over again without overcooking. Yum!
Oh yeah, without the chips they are called "The Power of Addiction", and with choc chips, they are "The Power of Addiction, Squared".
Enjoy! And let me know if you find a way to improve them.
