Sweetstakes: Pomona’s Acres of Cakes

It’s 7:30 on a Wednesday morning and in the hazy light home bakers are lining up at thA. County Fairgrounds. Some carry armloads of pink cardboard boxes or Tupperware containers holding their wares. Some pull little red wagons piled high with cakes, cookies and candies. Some make multiple trips--running back and forth from car to building once they have reached the door and been admitted.

There are homey-looking bundt cakes, apple pies and chocolate chip cookies, shiny, sky-high meringues and layer cakes that are downright professional. There is a cake decorated with cupcake mountains above a sheet-cake plain rent down the middle; tiny plastic four-wheel drives on a jet-black highway of frosting plunge into the brown sugar split. Karyn Conner calls it her “Shake ‘n’ Bake” cake.

“I’m from Pomona; I guess I should be from Yucca Valley,” she laughs and then begins chatting with the next person in line about the sudden string of aftershocks that have rolled across the valley this morning.

But you get the feeling that the only way she--or any of the other 500 or so entrants--would have noticed any earthquake at all is if it had caused a cake to fall. This is one serious bunch of bakers.

Witness the numbers: These 500 bakers have brought more than 1,800 items--an average of more than three entries per baker. Of course, there are some who have considerably bettered the average. Cecilia Rubio, for example, entered 17 categories--and that’s just baked goods. She also entered 11 items in the jellies, jams and pickles division judged the week before. She is also booked for a full slate of special contests sponsored by food companies that will be judged separately throughout the month of September.

Rubio, who lives in Perris, near Riverside, entered a lemon meringue pie at her first fair in 1972--the same year she got married and had to learn to cook--and won a pair of blue ribbons for it. She’s entered every year since. This year, she started baking five days ahead.

“I did things that can be frozen or that can sit in the refrigerator without changing,” she says. “Things like quick breads, layer cakes and bundt cakes, you can wrap them up real good and put them away. Yesterday I started taking out all my cakes, defrosting them, frosting them, putting them on a cake plate and wrapping them up. My pie this year is a cheese pie and could be done two days ahead of time, so that helped.

“Anything very immediate, like my lemon meringue pie, which I saved for another contest (at the county fair) this year, I would probably have done last night. Let me put it this way: I’ve stayed up until 4 in the morning baking and then gotten up early the next morning to put on the meringue. It just doesn’t hold well. It starts weeping and doesn’t look nice.”

The competition is catching. This year, in addition to her own entries, Rubio’s mother, sister, mother-in-law, sister-in-law, and nieces and nephews have all entered baked goods. A brother-in-law entered the sewing competition.

Jennifer Bernbaum, a full-time student at Cal State Dominguez Hills, is a teacher’s aide and works part-time for an insurance company. This year she entered 12 items and began working on them a week ago, making cookie doughs to freeze and bake at the last minute, decorating cakes and, finally, baking pies. “I was up all night,” she says. “I even ditched one of my classes.”

Alberta Dunbar knows what that bug is like. She’s been entering the county fair since 1971. Now living in San Diego, she cut back to nine special contests this year because she’d just returned from the state fair in Sacramento, where she won 30 blue ribbons, three reds, one white and four best-of-class. Only one of her entries failed to place--a jar of pickles that popped a lid going over the Grapevine.

The state fair competition takes place over a three-week period, and Dunbar rented a motel room with a kitchenette for the duration, trucking up her trusty KitchenAid and all of her pots and pans.

After taking up baking in self-defense at age 9 (“My mother was not a very good cook, I’m sorry to say”), she entered her first competition after touring several fairgrounds. “My husband worked for the Daily Racing Form, and he worked press boxes all over California,” she says. “I’d go with him and look at the baking contests and I just figured, ‘Well, hell, I can do that well.’ ”

She entered her first fair at Del Mar with four items and took home four ribbons. The next year, she entered 13 and took home 13 ribbons. “When that happens, boy, you’re hooked,” she says. “Since then, it’s just accelerated.”

A lot of these people have been entering the fair for so long they know each other. Entry day becomes an opportunity for reunion as well as competition. Geraldine Powell hangs around the entrance snagging anyone with a county fair cookbook and volunteering to sign theirs if they’ll sign hers.

“I’ve been doing this for 10 years,” she says. “You know, a couple of years ago, I lost my book. I looked all over and couldn’t find it. I just went home in tears. The next year, when I brought my cakes in, they said they had something for me. A little girl had brought it back. She said she’d just forgotten she had it.”

Marjorie Howe brought her friends with her. Pulling her gingerbread house from a well-traveled station wagon, she points at the intricately painted cookie people. “I stayed up all night painting them,” she says. “I don’t really care about the competition. These are my friends and they want to come to the fair.” Howe’s house is like a piece by folk artist the Rev. Howard Finster--a temple to junk food made from various types of crackers, pretzel sticks, gum drops and candy corn.

Another county fair regular, Kathy Specht, didn’t make it this year because of the conflict with the state fair. She will enter some of the special contests, preserving her streak of 20 straight county fairs. Now living in Carlsbad, she says the commute is a major factor in her baking game plan. “The freeways are really getting packed,” she says. “I figured out that if I leave at 5:30 in the morning, I’ll get there at 7:30. But if I leave at 6, it’ll be a quarter of 9 before I get there because of the difference in the way people drive.

“In fact, I got the only ticket I’ve ever gotten because of the county fair. I was running late and I came flying around a curve near Laguna Niguel when all of a sudden I saw this red light behind me. When the policeman looked in back and saw all these cakes, he couldn’t stop laughing. He gave me a ticket, anyway though. I tried to bribe him with a cake, but he said he’d just pretend he hadn’t heard that.”

Her absence this year was noticed. “Everyone knows my car,” she says. “When I had to get rid of my little Celica, I wound up buying a Toyota pickup. We put a snug-top on the back and I carry everything in there.”

Her license plate: LV2BAKE.