Arts & Apples. And dessert.

We moved here from North Carolina in mid-May, and one of the first things I did was to bookmark Michigan Festivals & Events, because Wiggy has been telling me about all the fun things that go on over the weekends here. 

Last Saturday was the 45th annual Arts & Apples Festival in Rochester, and since it's so close to home we put it on the calendar.  Wiggy discovered two weeks ago that they also hold an apple pie and apple dessert competition during the festival.  Now, I love to bake -- I do a killer cheesecake, and there's a lemon buttermilk poundcake I make that people in Wilson, NC call "crack cake" because it's that addictive.   But I've never entered a baking competition before, and I thought that this might be the time to start.

So I went through my favorite apple dessert recipes -- my piecrust needs a lot more practice before I enter it into any competitions -- and found a Bavarian apple torte that I'd made once before and thought needed some tweaking.  And I began to tweak.  Brown sugar, white sugar?  Whole wheat flour, or would that be too heavy?  The apples, the spices, the cream cheese filling . . . Wiggy, Mom and several friends ate an awful lot of torte in two weeks.

There were 13 desserts entered, and 12 pies.  To my complete and babbling shock, I won the blue ribbon for desserts!  This is the link for a post from Oakland County Moms with the recipes for my torte and the winning pie.  And this is a link to a story filed by CMNTv, a local cable channel -- you can see what I mean by "babbling shock". 

All the pies and desserts were cut up and sold by the piece after the competition, and I came home with a blue ribbon.  I am still flat-out amazed -- but I'm going to do that again.  That was fun!