At an age when most young people limit their cooking to scrambled eggs and chocolate-chip cookies, 12-year-old Kristina Banni, of Libertyville, is already a national award-winning baker.
Kristina, who won a $2,000 third prize in February`s Pillsbury Bake-Off, showed off her talents Thursday at the Libertyville Farmer`s Market. The 8th grader from Highland Junior High School offered several of Pillsbury`s most popular Bake-Off recipes, although she omitted her own prize-winning creation, a raspberry-filled apricot cake, because it requires refrigeration.
The sweets that Kristina had spent all of Wednesday baking disappeared in less than 10 minutes, gobbled up by hungry market-goers. There was a ”tunnel- of-fudge” cake from a 1966 Bake-Off and an orange ”kiss-me” cake from the 1950 contest, among other things.
”See, I told you we should have come on time,” one would-be nibbler said when she and her friend realized that everything had already disappeared. ”I thought I made enough. I can`t believe it`s all gone,” the youngster apologized to latecomers.
Kristina`s interest in baking comes naturally. Her mother, Debbie Banni, has entered the Pillsbury Bake-Off several times, ”although I never won,”
she said. Kristina`s maternal grandmother, Pat Bradley of California, was one of six $10,000 second-prize winners in this year`s contest.
”I started by watching them in the kitchen, and sometimes they`d let me crack the eggs or pour in the flour,” Kristina said.
”When I was about 8, I woke up one morning and decided to make some banana muffins for breakfast before anyone else got up. They turned out all right, and after that, my mother started letting me cook things on my own,”
she said.
Kristina entered her first Bake-Off when she was 10. She didn`t win, but she kept practicing and entered again two years later. More than 5,000 recipes are submitted to the biannual contest, which carries a grand prize of $50,000. Just 100 finalists are selected to prepare their creations in the Bake-Off competition, and Kristina was the youngest competitor.
Kristina may be a prizewinning baker, but when she got the call notifying her that she`d been selected as a finalist, her reaction was that of a typical excited adolescent.
”She answered the phone upstairs and started screaming. We thought that there was something wrong. It took us about two minutes to get out of her what had happened,” Debbie Banni said.
A large part of the $2,000 Kristina won as one of 18 third-place finishers this year was put in a savings bond for college. Some went for school clothes, Kristina said, ”and I also left myself a little bit to play with.”
