Champion baker Marilyn Barber is eyeing an Ekka prize

Watch out wannabes - champion baker Marilyn Barber’s back in her Fernvale kitchen preparing for another assault on the famous Brisbane Ekka cake competition.

As she waltzed with a young farmer from out of town at the 1975 Oakey Show Ball, the then Marilyn Rosenberger let it slip that she’d won the show’s overall baking competition.

And that was it. Within a year, the champion baker and the lad from Lowood, Trevor Barber, were married.

“He thought, ‘Oh well, she’s a keeper, she can cook’,” jokes Mrs Barber, now 69.

They’ve been a team ever since and Mrs Barber’s baking has gone from strength to strength and show to show, mixing and whisking and icing her way to becoming Queensland’s Queen of baked goods.

Marilyn Barber of Lowood with some of her cakes she has baked to enter in the Ekka. Pic Peter Wallis.

In a china cabinet in their home in Fernvale, the Brisbane Valley town where the couple retired to seven years ago, sit the ribbons Mrs Barber has amassed since deciding to branch out from country shows and take on the Ekka with gusto in 2008.

From that year on – apart from 2013 when she had a knee replacement and last year when Covid-19 cancelled the Brisbane show – Mrs Barber has taken out the purple rosette for most successful exhibitor in the cakes, biscuits and scones section.

She had considered not entering this year; her arthritis makes it tough to stand for any length of time and she’s recently had a carpal tunnel operation on her hand but her husband spurred her on.

SCROLL DOWN FOR MARILYN’S BUTTER CAKE RECIPE

“I said, ‘Oh I don’t think I’m going to go,’ and Trevor said, ‘Well, it might be your last year, you better go’,” says Mrs Barber. “He encourages me.”

He suggested, though, that it might be an idea to cut back on the number of types of cakes and biscuits she enters, which in the past has reached 20. “He said, ‘Take 10 entries’.”

But old habits are hard to break and by the time Mrs Barber had looked through the Ekka’s baking competition schedule, she’d ticked off 16. She grins. “Well, I’ve got to make it worthwhile.”

Cake judge Marilyn Barber and steward Edna Watkins during the judging of the carrot cake section at the Kalbar Show in 2017.

So, as the Ekka approaches, their kitchen will be filled with the sweet smell of butter cakes, date rolls, Kentish cakes, peach blossom cakes, scones, lamingtons, patty cakes, sponges and teacakes.

The butter cake is a favourite. The key to success, she says, is precision.

Weigh everything. A cup of flour can vary in weight depending on how heavily it’s packed; an egg can range from 50 to 70 grams. You want one that is 60 grams.

All ingredients should be the best quality – Mrs Barber uses eggs from her own chickens, full cream milk and Defiance flour. Sift the flour.

SCROLL DOWN FOR MARILYN’S BUTTER CAKE RECIPE

Always have your ingredients at room temperature and warm the mixing bowl before use with a bit of hot water. Mrs Barber greases her tins and gives them a light dusting of flour before pouring in the mixture and putting in the oven.

Do not, under any circumstances, open the oven door until its ready.

So attuned is Mrs Barber to her baking that she can simply smell when her cakes are ready. She never uses a straw to test because the hole it leaves might be seen by a judge.

“You just tell by smell; that’s how you can tell a cake is cooked in the oven, that smell, and also, if it leaves the side of the tin,” she says.

Ekka Baker Marilyn Barber on the day she married husband Trevor.

Mrs Barber won her first baking competition when she was 15, after her home economics teacher suggested the class enter some cakes and biscuits into the show at her hometown of Oakey. It was a thrill to win and the baking bug bit.

After marrying Trevor and moving to his farm at Lowood, she put some of her treats into the Lowood Show. They did well. So then she tried the Gatton show, then the Marburg show and the Toowoomba show.

“Back when I was entering a lot of them, I used to start baking around the middle of May and be baking every couple of weeks for a show until the Ekka,” she says. She now judges at a number of country shows and is a steward at the Lowood and Gatton shows.

Her recipes come from her mother and other country women whose cooking she’s admired, as well as magazines and the internet. On the somewhat controversial topic of the consistency of an Anzac biscuit, she is quite adamant.

Ekka baker Marilyn Barber’s butter cake recipe. Picture: NIGEL HALLETT

“They’ve got to be crunchy,” she says. “In judging, that’s one of the things you look for. You’ve got to try to snap them, you don’t want them soft.”

She loves a good scone and will be entering plain, fruit and pumpkin varieties this year. The late Lady Flo Bjelke-Petersen’s recipe “makes a nice scone, I don’t mind it” but she’s got a better one.

Her hope is that the hype about Covid-19 leading people back to the kitchen and “old-fashioned” pastimes like baking will prove true at this year’s Ekka and that there will be some strong competition.

“If the young ones don’t take over, it’s going to be a dying art, isn’t it?”