Giant Cinnamon Rolls – Best in Show

When she's not working on her family farm, this lowa mom is mixing up blue-ribbon recipes.

- By Shelley Levitt

Cristen Clark does not believe in hiding cooking appliances, at least not when it comes to her KitchenAid stand mixers. Enter the kitchen of her central Iowa home and you'll spot three of the beloved mixers two in candy apple red and one in gleaming copper lined up on her counter. "They take up way too much space, but I never put them away," Cristen says. "I love to stare at them because they're so pretty."

In mid-August, when the Iowa State Fair takes place, all three mixers are busy kneading batches of dough. There are 15 classes of yeast rolls-white, wheat, potato, whole grains, rye, and more-and Cristen likes to compete in them all. "Yeast rolls are kind of my jam," she says. She's collected too many blue ribbons to count, starting with her first competition in 2010, when she won for a cinnamon roll recipe.

That award led to a new family business. With the money she won, Cristen bought a red female pig, a Duroc gilt, and named her Cinnamon. Then Cristen and her husband, Mike, launched Clark Families, a purebred-pig farm. While those animals are raised primarily for breeding and fair showing, the Clarks also manage a larger commercial pig farm.

But during the fall harvest, Cristen's focus is on the corn and soybean farm near Prairie City, Iowa, that has been in her family for more than 150 years.

Working with her father, she operates the grain cart attached to her tractor. "In the fall I'm basically a grain jockey," she: says. "I chase the combine so we don't have to drive it all the way across the field to empty the crops into the semis that are going into town. We're burning the daylight to get as much done as quickly as possible."