Two Bakers Are Racking up Minnesota State Fair Ribbons

by Mollee Francisco | Aug 2025

McKenna Johnson’s Chocolate Chip Cookies. Photos: Chris Emeott

Watch out, Blue Ribbon Baker Marjorie Johnson of Minnesota State Fair fame. Two Plymouth residents are gaining notice for their culinary accolades, and they’re just getting started.

At last year’s State Fair, McKenna Johnson took fourth place out of 198 entries in the highly competitive Chocolate Chip Cookies category, and Marissa Weiss won a blue ribbon in the Cake-type/Single Layer bars category for her lemon bars. We sat down with both makers to learn what inspired their passion for baking and what it takes to catch the judges’ attention at The Great Minnesota Get-Together.

Meeting Demand

Johnson’s confections are so popular that she started her own business—Kenna’s Cakes—in 2017. She specializes in artful cakes and themed cupcake sets, all completely customized to fit a client’s taste.

Johnson started baking at a young age. “My mom was a home ec teacher turned stay-at-home mom,” she says. “She taught me all the techniques. That’s kind of where I got the bug.”

Johnson baked through college, which is when she began getting requests that snowballed into her cottage business. “It started really organically,” she says.

McKenna Johnson

But even after starting Kenna’s Cakes, Johnson didn’t enter the state fair until 2022. Out of her four entries—chocolate brownies, chocolate chip cookies, chocolate espresso cakes and vanilla layer cake—Johnson placed second for both her cookies and her vanilla layer cake. The Chocolate Chip Cookies category is among the baking contest’s most popular categories with hundreds of entries annually. Cookies are judged on flavor, appearance and uniqueness.

Johnson says that the key to her sweet success is three components. The first is using really good quality chocolate. “I like a blend of bittersweet chocolate and semi-sweet,” she says. She also uses brown butter in her recipe, and tops her cookies with large, flaky sea salt.

Johnson took 2023 off after having her son, but she returned to the competition in 2024 to collect a fourth-place ribbon for her cookies. Standing out among the legions of talented bakers is “so cool,” Johnson says. “I feel like I’m part of the Minnesota baking community.”

With more than 3,500 baked good entries each year, the Minnesota State Fair is one of the largest amateur baking contests in the country. The significance of that is not lost on Johnson or Weiss.

“I want to keep this art alive at the fair,” Weiss says. “I want to keep Minnesota on the map.”

Baking Gene

Weiss inherited her baking skills from her grandmother, Dolores Weiss. “She was a fabulous baker,” she says. “There was never a weekend we went to visit that we didn’t come home with some baked good. It seemed magical to me.”

Marissa Weiss

Weiss says that though the baking gene bypassed her parents, her sister Amara Peterson embraced a love of baking early on and took Weiss under her wing at 12 or 13 to teach her some of the family’s favorite recipes. Her sister’s tutelage paid off, and Weiss used one such recipe to impress the judges during her first time entering the state fair’s baking contest. “I entered for the first time in 2019 and won a blue ribbon for my banana bread,” she says. “It was a family recipe. A spiced, dark banana bread loaf.”

Weiss had a sneaking suspicion it might catch the judges’ eyes after walking through the previous year and noticing a glut of “pale breads.”

Weiss entered her banana bread again in 2021 (The state fair was not held in 2020.) and took home second place. “I noticed a lot of darker loaves that year,” she says. In 2022, Weiss left the state fair empty handed. “It was a bad year,” she says. “It was like I was all thumbs.”

But she came roaring back in 2023 with a new entry and a new zest for baking. Weiss entered her lemon bars in the Hennepin County Fair and was recognized with a grand championship ribbon. “It was the best thing in the entire baking competition,” she says.

Marissa Weiss’s Lemon Bars

Weiss was all geared up to enter the bars at the state fair only to be struck with COVID-19 just before the competition began. “I couldn’t, in good conscience, enter anything,” she says.

That made 2024 the first year that state fair judges could get a taste of Weiss’ lemon bars. “I was in the middle of moving, but I was determined to enter,” she says. Her lemon bars were a blue-ribbon hit. “These are not your traditional lemon bars,” Weiss says. “They have the texture of a brownie; a very dense, cakey bar with a glaze on top. They’re bright and refreshing and usually get inhaled wherever I take them.”