Sweet Success

Home Bakers Rise to the Occasion at PA Farm Show

By Paula Piatt
Penn Lines Contributor

 

The ingredients are all there: flour, butter, sugar, eggs and chocolate — don’t ever forget the chocolate. But it’s those extras in the recipe that make it special — dedication, perseverance, humility and, yes, even a bit of luck.

In the Pennsylvania Farm Show baking world, it takes all of this and more to craft a championship entry. Held each January in Harrisburg, the Farm Show hosts hundreds of contests. The family living division is one of 41 classifications, and it alone has more than 30 contest categories from quilts and preserved food to photography and clothing. But don’t think that just because there are hundreds of contests that any of them are easy.

“It’s an awakening when you get there,” says Sharon Karlheim, who lives in Cambria County, a region powered by Indiana-based REA Energy Cooperative and Dubois-based United Electric Cooperative. She’s been competing in the baking contests for more than a decade.

“The first time I went I had a nice cake. I thought, ‘OK, I got this,’ ” she remembers, laughing now at her naiveté. “Oh my goodness, it’s another ballgame. There are generally somewhere between 75 and 85 entries, and they’re all first-place winners.”

Refining the recipe for success

Eligibility for the statewide Chocolate Cake, Blue Ribbon Apple Pie and Incredible Angel Food Cake comes after winning at one of the “approved Pa. agricultural fairs.” Karlheim has earned her place at the state table through the Cookport and Harmony grange fairs in addition to the American Legion County Fair in Ebensburg. And she’s not the first to think “I’ve got this.”
 

Sharon Karlheim, shown with 2021 PA Fair Queen Addison Neff, has not only qualified for PA Farm Show baking competitions, she’s also won them.
THE WINNING RECIPE: Sharon Karlheim, shown with 2021 PA Fair Queen Addison Neff, has not only qualified for PA Farm Show baking competitions, she’s also won them. Here, she accepts the blue ribbon for her apple pie. (Photo courtesy of the Pa. State Department of Agriculture)
 

Everett’s Pam Foor, a member of Bedford Rural Electric Cooperative (REC), was also a contest rookie once. After growing a blue-ribbon Christmas cactus one year, she and her husband wandered over to the baked goods.

“There was a peach pie there, and he said, ‘Yours looks better than that one. Why don’t you enter it?’ ” she remembers. The next year, she was off and running with the peach pie, a chocolate cake, jelly, and some cookies. But Foor was soon floored. “I had no idea that there was so much involved in it. You go down and you think you’re going to win, and it doesn’t work that way.”

Well, unless maybe you’re Jim Harper.

Although he had never before created a whoopie pie (“I like them, I just never made them.”), the Pennsylvania Furnace baker held a lock on Pennsylvania’s Greatest Whoopie Pie for the contest’s first four years, beginning with the inaugural 2016 competition. Each year, his chocolate/peanut butter confections wowed the judges, as he tinkered with the same recipe.

“It’s an eye for detail,” Harper says. “You can always make it better — whether it’s better flavor, or a little taller, or a little fluffier or creamier. There’s the peanut butter icing — making it smoother or a little stronger, but not too sweet, maybe a little thicker.”

But chocolate and peanut butter year after year? “That’s what my kids would eat,” he says.

Harper, who lives in Huntingdon County, an area serviced by Valley REC and New Enterprise REC, is not alone in latching on to one recipe and working to perfect it.

For years, Foor leaned on lemons for her angel food cake recipes. A cookbook collector, she says she reads them “like most people read novels,” and once she finds a recipe, she’ll stick with it. “One year I had six chocolate cakes baked, and I was not pleased with any of them,” she says. “If I go down and I don’t win, I’ll keep the same recipe the next year and revamp something.”

Jim Harper of Huntingdon County is another winning PA Farm Show competitor.
BEGINNER’S LUCK: Jim Harper of Huntingdon County is another winning PA Farm Show competitor. Funny thing is, he had never made a whoopie pie before, but that didn’t stop him from winning Pennsylvania’s Greatest Whoopie Pie contest four years in a row. (Photo courtesy of the Pa. State Department of Agriculture)
 

Karlheim, too, keeps an eye on the competition each year — even when she wins. After grabbing the blue ribbon for her chocolate cake in 2023, she noticed a particular flavor combination placing among the winners. She’s headed to Harrisburg this year with an “Almond Joy” cake — and an apple pie and an angel food cake after qualifying in all three contests — that hopefully also appeals to the judges.

It’s all about the judges

No matter how “good” you think your entry is, the judges are the final arbiter. Each is assigned a table with about a dozen entries and must whittle them down for the next round of 10. Creativity and appearance may catch their eye, but at 15 points, those are worth only half of the 30 points assigned to flavor on the scorecard. And taste is so very personal.

“Anybody can make a chocolate cake, but on that particular day, with that particular judge, what are they looking for? Judges are people too, and a lot of it depends on who the judges are,” Foor says.

Harper agrees: “Judge 1 might like more chocolate, Judge 2 likes dark chocolate and Judge 3 likes bittersweet; everybody is different. Your flavors have to complement each other; that’s the hardest part,” says the baker, who appreciates the judges with professional backgrounds. “Even if they don’t like it, they’ll still say that it’s the best product.”

And, of course, there are rules. The apple pie filling must be at least 60% apples, the chocolate cake must feature chocolate or cocoa as the main ingredient, and for the angel food cake, bakers are asked to use Pennsylvania-produced and -packed eggs. Everything must be made “from scratch,” a list of ingredients is required, and all garnishes must be edible.

All contestants agree: There’s “edible,” and then there are quality ingredients.
 

Pam Foor, a member of Bedford Rural Electric Cooperative, displays her first-place angel food cake and ribbon at the 2020 PA Farm Show.TURNING A NEGATIVE INTO A POSITIVE: Pam Foor, a member of Bedford Rural Electric Cooperative, displays her first-place angel food cake and ribbon at the 2020 PA Farm Show. What the judges didn’t know is that the cake — and Foor — had a meltdown just hours before the contest. (Photo courtesy of the Pa. State Department of Agriculture)
 

“Use the best ingredients that you can afford,” says Foor, who enters either through the Bedford County Fair or the Claysburg Farm Show. “Find your freshest fruits and get the higher quality ingredients. I have a local farmer here, and I use his farm-fresh eggs. It really does make a difference.”

Harper left competitive baking back in 2020 for this very reason. After winning with his red raspberry bars in that year’s inaugural Jelly/Jam Bar Cookie Contest, he decided the price of ingredients — good ingredients — was cost prohibitive after shopping for fruit and finding cherries were $7 per pound.

“When COVID hit,” he said, “the price of everything went through the roof. I stopped competing at even the local fairs.”

Harper is all about the ingredients and the science behind the creation. Watching his grandmother in the kitchen, he remembers “from nothing, she made these great chocolate chip cookies. It was like magic!” To this day, his recipes are more like “equations,” he says, and it’s taken him years to put them all together.

“People will say to me, ‘I tried your recipe, and it didn’t turn out.’ That’s because that recipe uses my water, my sugar, my flour — all in my oven,” he says, ticking off the variables that make a difference: the minerals in the ground that grew the wheat that made the flour, the diet of the cows that gave the milk. Even the color of the pans and the hotspot in your oven can play a role.

“I really make it hard for myself,” he says with a chuckle, realizing the lengths he goes to in the kitchen. But he may be starting to get the competitive itch again. “I’m thinking maybe next year I’ll start getting back into it. I really enjoy going down each year and catching up with the people.”

Precious cargo

So, yes, earning a spot in the statewide baking competitions is hard, but so is … actually getting there. It’s January, there’s always the chance for bad weather, and none of these contestants live next door to the Farm Show Complex. It can be a harrowing ride to Harrisburg with the precious cargo — potentially award-winning cakes and pies — buckled in the back seat.

“My husband always takes me,” says Karlheim of her spouse, Regis, her No. 1 supporter. “He drives a truck for a living, so he’s very good. We leave here at 4:30 in the morning, and there’s deer and we never know if we’ll have ice, sleet, snow or whatever. If someone runs into us or we have to hit the brakes, it’s all over.”

Foor takes two of everything with her. This year, that includes an angel food cake, chocolate cake and apple pie, as she, too, has qualified for all three top contests in 2024. She also brings a “repair kit,” which came in handy one cold January day. The apple pie competition was in the morning, and her angel food cake was safely stowed in the car, waiting for the afternoon judging.

“I went to get my cake out of the car and it was cold, but it was in this cake box and the sun was so hot … the top of it had just melted. I’m not gonna lie, I cried a little bit,” she remembers. But she still had an hour before the judging. “I got my spatula out, got my extra icing out and decorated it the best that I could in that freezing cold car.”

And promptly won first place.

“Apply final frosting in a sub-freezing car in the parking lot” was probably not in the recipe, but that’s one of the “extras” that puts these bakers over the top.

 

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