Fiesta Aluma Chef Contest

We spent a week at Lazydays Campground in Tucson a few weeks ago with 110 other Airstreamers.

We thought we could meet some cool folks, talk Airstream and probably learn a lot too. After checking out the events for the week, one caught my eye. A baking contest in which they tell you 5 ingredients that have to be included in your recipe, which were cream cheese, butternut squash, great northern beans, raisins and maple syrup and you had to cook it in your Airstream.  So, it hasn't been that long ago that I hung up my bakers cap, so I decided to make a butternut raisin cake with cream cheese frosting. I had 2 recipes in mind and thought I would bake both and see how they turned out. I knew one of them I wanted to look like an Airstream, especially since you were being judged on creativity. Well, I spent the entire day in my Airstream baking and decorating away. Judging was at 

3 pm to be judged by a professional chef and 2 others. Both, of my recipes turned out well, but clearly one was better than the other, so I decided I would enter both. When we got there Sam found out that you could only enter 1 recipe per person. So, Sam said that he would just put his name on one of them. I wanted to put my name on the one that tasted the best, but didn't think the judges would believe that he decorated the Airstream cake.  Wouldn't you know it, the professional chef loved Sam's so much she even called him over to talk about it. She said it was better than hers. I was hoping she would ask him some specific ?'s about the cake that he would have had no idea how to respond, but she didn't. She was just raving over it and I was like whatever, I made the damn thing. So, there were 3 winners to go onto the next round, which were Sam, me and another older gentleman. They handed each of us a Trader Joe's bag with 5 more ingredients. This time they were smokehouse almonds, green olives, sriracha sauce(hot sauce), 2 green apples and a white chocolate bar. Now, the competition was on between husband and wife. Sam made a lentil veggie burger and I made a salad. They both tasted amazing, but we liked, and a few others thought, that the salad was a winner. The other winner made a turkey chili that I thought was amazingly yummy. But the cute little chef girl said that Sam was the overall winner. Seriously!  Hey, behind every great man is a strong woman is all I've got to say. He won a nice cutting board and a $50 William Sonoma gift certificate. It was fun, but also glad it was and now we can relax and enjoy the rest of the weekend. I guess we will always have a part of the bakery in us!