Just past the corn dog stand, rows of carnival games, and art displays, you’ll find Alisa Woods in her happy place: the Elwell Family Food Center at Iowa State Fairgrounds in Des Moines, Iowa. After testing, perfecting, and delivering her Mint Chocolate Cookie for the fair’s “Best Snack Cookie” category to the iconic checkered tablecloth-topped table, she listens in as judges award her the coveted blue ribbon. Her only regret is that her blue-ribbon-winning grandma isn’t there to celebrate yet another family win at the iconic table.
Because blue ribbons run in this baking family. Woods’ State Fair ambitions were sparked in her grandmother’s kitchen more than 30 years ago, she says. When grandma was in preparation mode for State Fair competitions in the 1980s and ‘90s, Woods recalls, a family visit had tasty work built in: “Her test batches were packaged in sandwich bags stacked in the freezer,” she says, “for all of her eight hungry grandkids to snag.” Woods has vibrant memories of her grandmother’s basement stairwell lined with blue ribbons from baking competitions—like a kind of fluttery wallpaper.
“When I moved back to Iowa after living in Chicago and New Orleans after college,” she says, “I decided to enter the State Fair baking competition in 2013 to honor my grandma (who was going through dementia at the time), and flex my competitive muscle.”
Clearly something had sunk in. In her freshman Fair outing, Woods earned first place for beginners’ desserts and first place overall with her lavender cupcake with lemon curd and vanilla bean buttercream. Over the next seven years, she took home dozens of blue ribbons (including a remarkable 16 in one year alone). Each year, she’d add a new skill or perfect a fresh flavor combination—taking her bar (cookie) and raising it. It was always just a hobby, until this award-winning amateur realized she had all of the ingredients to make it more than that…