The best yo-yos in town
It’s 6.30pm the night before the official opening of the 2025 Melbourne Royal Show. My wife, Zoe, is scrolling on her phone, nervously checking the results from her four entries in the baking competition. Fancy biscuits… no prize. Plain biscuits… no prize. Cooked slice… no prize. Only one category left, but it’s the big one.
Suddenly, a little squeal of joy, and a smile spreads across her face. “I can retire!” Zoe says. She has just won a blue ribbon for her yo-yo biscuits. First prize! With 30 entrants vying for top spot this year the yo-yos are, by a considerable distance, the largest and most hotly-contested category across all the baking sections at the show. Bigger than scones. Bigger than sponge cakes.
The yo-yo is a classic, but also deceptively tricky to get just right. It’s incredible how many so-so yo-yos you’ll find even at professional bakeries. They should melt in your mouth, not crumble all over the place as soon as you take a bite. They can’t be too gigantic, nor too tiny. The right balance of icing to biscuit ratio. They should have good colour, not be underdone.
At least, that’s my opinion. It’s impossible to get inside the heads of the show judges, to know precisely what they are looking for. Some years the judging proves surprising and Zoe wins for something she didn’t think she had nailed, and misses out when she was really proud of her work. But I wasn’t surprised that her yo-yos won this year. They have a beautiful, buttery scent, and they taste magnificent. Zoe used a different brand of custard powder this year, and wonders if that made all the difference. Whatever the case, they are screaming ‘eat me’ and I am happy to oblige.
In 2013, Zoe won a giant blue rosette emblazoned with ‘Best In Show – Open Cookery’ for some seriously impressive biscuits. It’s hard to beat that result. There have been other successes in various categories over the years. But all along, top spot in the yo-yo section was what she really wanted. Perhaps fittingly for the yo-yo category, her results have been up and down, and last year she wasn’t on the podium.
In 2023, she claimed second place for the second year in a row. In 2022, she had narrowly lost to Anne-Marie Primmer, a serial and serious champion across dozens of cookery sections. Interviewed by the Herald Sun back in 2012, Anne-Marie said she entered 82 categories that year; Zoe, by comparison, generally enters only four or five. She jokes that Anne-Marie is her arch-nemesis, despite them never having met. Truth be told, she sees Anne-Marie as someone to admire, not an adversary.
Show baking is a fascinating niche area that would make a terrific fly-on-the-wall documentary. The same successful names pop up year after year, but new entrants sometimes upstage them. That’s the beauty of blind judging. If you’re good enough, you can win.
It doesn’t come without stress, though. “Why do I do it to myself!” Zoe often exclaims while up to her neck in flour, cocoa, icing sugar and dirty trays the day before the entries are due. The busy nature of day-to-day life with three kids means that she leaves it until far too late to decide which recipes to make, madly rummaging through cookbooks with less than 48 hours to go, ambitiously choosing slices and biscuits she has never made before.
There will always be a drama on baking day. A slice with a hard chocolate topping will prove too difficult to cut neatly. Something won’t set properly. This year a lemon slice sunk and flopped and turned upside-down, with the base floating on top. It happens to the best. This year, baking day also happened to fall on my birthday, which only added to the chaos. Zoe was up until 2am, and then rose early the next morning to get everything finished.
And then, it’s a drive across Melbourne to have the entries delivered to the showgrounds by midday on Saturday. This year she had a little time to spare but in past years, heavy traffic has caused heavy stress. Zoe will briefly cross paths with other mysterious entrants as they hand over their wares, some madly trying to arrange biscuits and cakes and slices on paper trays at the last minute, or sprinkle on some eleventh-hour decorations. It’s like a cross between Bake Off and The Amazing Race.
Zoe has been entering baking into the Melbourne Show since 2008, when she and her then 85-year-old Grandma Millie decided that, after years of looking at the exhibits in the glass cabinets, they should have a go themselves. The following year, at 86, Millie earned second prize for her orange cake and was dumbstruck by the result. She couldn’t believe that little old her could win a ribbon at the Royal Melbourne Show!
Millie retired from show baking soon afterwards, happy with her late-in-life success, but she was always proud of Zoe’s efforts and was the first person Zoe would ring when the results came through each year. Millie died three years ago at the age of 98. I’m sure she would be extremely proud of Zoe’s winning yo-yos this year, and of the fact that the baton is being passed to the next generation, for two of our kids entered the children’s Anzac biscuit competition this year, and earned third place and a very highly-commended citation.
It's a lovely family tradition, and a reminder that the Melbourne Show is really about everyday people and their skills. Sometimes it feels like you can’t escape the sideshows and extreme rides and hellscape of the showbag pavilion (‘showbag’ was a slang insult when I was a kid, because it meant you were full of crap). But the show’s heart is the craft, the cookery, the livestock exhibits, the CWA café with their mixed sandwiches and scones.
And for our family, it’s about the baking. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Zoe’s win this year is that the yo-yo recipe she uses comes from her Year Eight high school home economics class. Good old school home-ec, coming in useful 30 years later. Zoe has often said that she could retire from show baking if she ever won for her yo-yos. But I think that would be a crime. And I promise that has nothing to do with the fact that I am currently shoving another blue-ribbon winning yo-yo in my mouth.
After all, the real crime would be letting them go stale.
