"THIS is exhibition quality.” The judge’s crisp words filled Glamorgan Vale dairy farmer Geoff Beattie with pride as he watched a ribbon being placed around his winning plum pudding entry.
It was the 1990 Marburg Show and the first Geoff had ever entered. His son, standing beside his beaming father, pulled Geoff’s big hat down over his head.
“Don’t let your head swell too much now,” he cheekily told to his father.
But for Geoff to be told he had the skills to take on experienced show cooks at the Brisbane Royal Show was by no means ordinary praise.
Geoff entered the Ipswich Show the next weekend and won a prize for each of his 14 entries.
“I thought, ‘I must be all right’,” Geoff recalled.
The entries for the 1990 Ekka were due three months before the Royal Show, at the end of May. This left Geoff with only two weeks to prepare. He submitted 11 entries that year to receive a staggering eight awards – all at his first exhibition and only his third time competing.
In 2015, Geoff Beattie is regarded as one of the most successful show cooks Queensland has ever produced and celebrates 25 years of competing. He had claimed 3083 show cooking awards up to the exhibition last year.
His highlight? The Florence Morgan Memorial Prize. Known as the holy grail of exhibition cooking, awarded for the rich dark fruit cake, the prize is hotly contested each year.
Geoff secured his fifth win in 2014 – the most times anyone has ever received it.
Geoff began his real love affair with cooking after a run-in with a bull. He was working in a meatworks in June 1979 when the animal knocked him down, causing a severe back injury.
After an operation in 1980, Geoff spent 21 days in hospital in full plastercast, only to be followed by a 13-week stint housebound while he recovered.
Geoff’s wife Elaine took on all the farm duties to keep their dairy running during this time.
“I was bored here and I said ‘Could you put everything out and I’ll cook?,” Geoff said.
“I got a taste of the cooking bug.”
A simple dinner turned to jams and marmalades, before he conquered the plum pudding. But it wasn’t the first time he had tried his hand at baking. Geoff was 16 years old when he slipped on the baking gloves for the first time.
He was home on school holidays from boarding at Ipswich Grammar and his mother and sisters were away from the farm.
“My dad did all the cooking and didn’t do any baking,” Geoff said.
“I said, ‘Dad, I want to make a cake’.” So Geoff baked a sponge, following a recipe out of his mother’s cookbook, which “turned out alright”.
“I think that’s the only time I ever cooked a cake right up until I had a need to.”
When Elaine was diagnosed with leukaemia in 1986, Geoff relied on his cooking even more.
As he watched her health degrade, he threw himself into improving his skills in the kitchen.
Elaine passed away the next year.
“That’s when I took on the cooking very seriously, and it was sort of a coping mechanism with the loss of Elaine.”
Like all true competitors, there’s a secret touch to Geoff Beattie's recipe that he's not quite ready to reveal yet.
At 69 years old, Geoff is still a fierce competitor on the show circuit. Putting out his ingredients – including the butter, flour, sugar, almonds and eggs – Geoff prepares to make his famous rich dark fruit cake to enter in this year’s Ekka.
The fruit has already soaked in rum and sherry for a few weeks. He cooks the fruit cake very slowly, just like his mother used to do in their family home. Geoff sets the oven timer to when he thinks the cake will be cooked perfectly and doesn’t open the door until the alarm goes off. Then Geoff checks on his work. Bending down beside the open oven, he listens patiently.
“[If] you can hear the cake talk, then it needs a bit more longer, but if it’s quiet, then it’s good.”
The ‘talking’ he refers to is more like “a sizzle – like there’s still moisture in the cake”.
The finished cake adds to his 41 exhibition entries this year, including preserves, butter cakes, scones, lollies, sponge cakes and biscuits. It’s a slightly smaller bundle than his usual 50.
Reflecting on his 25 years of competing, Geoff puts his success down to the human desire to improve.
“I think it’s in your blood that you want to do better. I think, ‘I can do better – I want to try better next time’. I now feel I’ve
achieved everything I want to do.”
