During the Waterford Food Festival, I got to sub in at an event where we checked in contestants, lined up contest submissions, and helped to judge some of the final products! I helped with the Kids' Baking Contest, and got to see so many cute designs and creative works.
Some of my favorite from the event were Captain Underpants cookies (done by a 4 year-old who licked one of the cookies before handing them to a judge), a 3D beach scene cookie, Spiderman web cookies, a sideways primrose lemon curd cake, and a chocolate ganache strawberry cake. With this being a kids' competition, the entries were really impressive. I'm not even sure I could bake what these contestants brought to the table.
If you've ever seen Cake Wars or The Great British Bakeoff, this was exactly the scene. Though the entries came in made already, I got to meet them and get to know a little bit about each masterpiece. I learned so much about their excitement and curiosity in the process, and some of them even shared their inspiration for the pieces. So much imagination went into making them.
It was difficult to help judge them after having met each of the contestants, especially knowing that only a few could win in each category. I learned a few things from judging, including the idea that we're all critics, which the judges advised us to exercise. We judged based on taste, color, and texture. For some of the desserts that were stunning, the taste and textures brought them down a peg, and vice versa.
I also learned that cookies (and other desserts) are supposed to have a flavor besides sugar. I'd never thought this through before, but when the panel of judges agreed that many sugar cookies didn't have any flavor, I realized I'd been eating cookies on autopilot my whole life. Instead of eating the cookie, they were experiencing every note and texture. In this way of eating, just one bite became sufficient instead of a whole cookie. This was especially true because we had 2 folding tables' worth of desserts to sample.
After tasting came the judging. My personal favorites in the cookie category were a lemon and caraway flavored cookie and an orange and seaweed cookie. In the cake category, the flavor of the chocolate ganache strawberry cake took first for me, while the primrose lemon curd took second. The final decisions were influenced by our collective eating, which is funny to think about because we immediately noted the highlights and lowlights of the desserts.
I intensely enjoyed this experience and was so glad to be included, even if I went home after a sugar crash. This experience reminds me of Yeats' poem, "The Host of the Air," where a faery feeds a man and then drowns him. The food becomes a lesson for experience:
"The dancers crowded about him,
And many a sweet thing said,
And a young man brought him red wine
And a young girl white bread.
But Bridget drew him by the sleeve,
Away from the merry bands,
To old men playing at cards
With a twinkling of ancient hands."
In this larger world, we are constantly crossing tides between tradition and trailblazing the future. I think this nods to the past of food, which becomes alluring and immoral in Yeats' poem, while the event today nods to the enjoyment of food for new bakers and an intense exploration. Food can take on so many metaphors and meanings in everyday life, which depends on the experience of an individual person.
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