Staff writer
The smell of hamburger cookies, snicker-poodles, and chocolate dominoes filled 10-year-old Brooke Nafziger’s kitchen Monday, but when she put the finishing touches on her 4-H baking efforts at 8:30 that evening, she was not sure she ever wanted to take on such a lofty goal again.
“Last year at the fair I saw there weren’t many entries in the commissioner’s cookie jar class so I decided that’s what I wanted to do this year,” she said. “I just didn’t realize it was going to be so much work!”
Following this year’s county fair theme of “At the Hop,” Nafziger, of rural Goessel, designed her cookie jar entry, which featured the required three types of cookies in a decorated gallon container, using a 45 record and dice handle, and stickers of 50s style cars, clothing, and music note pennants.
The cookies, the most important part of the project, were the most work.
“I actually started on Saturday and mixed up all the dry ingredients,” Brooke said. “Then today I got up at 6:30 and started baking.”
Nafziger said the domino cookies were the easiest and she cut them out from chocolate wafer dough, and then decorated them with up-side-down white chocolate chips. She liked the hamburger cookies the best, even though they took the most time.
“I used vanilla wafers for the buns, a chocolate mint grasshopper cookie for the meat, dyed coconut green for the lettuce, and then stuck some sesame seeds on top,” she said.
Brooke said she actually had not tasted any of the finished hamburger cookies yet because she was too tired.
“The hardest cookies to make were the snicker-poodles,” she said. “I flattened a round ball of dough for the head, and then made two teardrop shapes for the ears. The hard part was decorating the ears with the cake frosting bag.”
Brooke, a three-year-member of the Goessel Goal Getters 4-H club, expected to have a busy week at the fair. Her 4-H foods judging took place Tuesday morning, then she had arts and crafts and meat goats to show during the rest of the week.