The Edible Book Festival: A Place for Literary Jokes and Strange Food Combinations

What bookish joy! To prepare us all for National Library Week (April 13-19th this year), the annual Edible Book Festival celebrated books, creativity, and a reader’s relationship to the written word. The Festival was held in Memorial Library yesterday from 11 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., allowing folks to come in to browse and vote for most of the afternoon and then stay for the award winners and cake (since it was pretty hard to keep from eating all the delicious-looking entries).

Participants thought outside the “cake box” when it came to choosing their edible materials. Entries were crafted using a wide variety of ingredients including scones, bacon, nori (seaweed!), bologna, tofurky, and … Limburger cheese. Can you guess where the cheese was used?

Participants, library staff, and the curious public who came in to check it all out meandered through the tables of edible presentations, chuckling often, and then placed their votes for People’s Choice. This year, we were honored to have 4 judges from the community: Nichole Fromm and JonMichael Rasmus who run the blog  Eating in Madison A to Z, Orange Schroeder who is the owner of Orange Tree Imports and Cooking School, and Lesley Wolf, Program Manager for the UW School of Medicine and Public Health, as well as festival participant since 2010 and 4 time award winner.

And the winners of this year’s Festival are ….

• People’s Choice: The Rainbow Goblins (Katie and Everly Johnson)
• Most Creative Use of Ingredients: Sew Deadly (Casey Schacher)
• Best Visual Presentation (tie): Charlotte’s Web (Willow, Autumn, and Nola Walker) and Chicka Chicka Boom Boom! (Stephanie Unertl)
• Funniest/Punniest: Game of Scones (Deb & Hannah Nies)

Congratulations to the winners! All entries were, of course, a treat.