The second annual Cob Loaf Festival and World Championships is set to get underway on Saturday, November 17.
The event was previously held on a Wednesday evening, but was rescheduled for a weekend this year after the festival’s runaway success saw it featured on national news and go viral across the internet, according to Cob Loaf Federation President Andrew McKay.
“I suppose last year we had about 250 people there, but the interest we had on social media was just incredible, especially with Ellie Hawkey making her recipe that went viral and we got about 640,000 views or something like that,” Mr McKay said.
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The decision to move the event was made in order to ensure that everyone who wanted to attend would be free to make the journey to Wellington’s Cameron Park for the competition and judging.
“Obviously the Cob Loaf is something that just touches everyone’s heart and we’re hoping for a lot of people travelling. We don’t really know how many people are going to rock up, that’s really the million dollar question,” Mr McKay said.
Entrants into the festival will be competing across five categories; spinach, cheese and bacon, cold cob, freestyle and dessert cobs.
“The winner of each section will go in and the best of those will end up being named world champion.”
Entrants into the festival will have to share their creation with the crowds on the day if they want a real chance at taking home the world championship.
“It’s sort of a sharing sort of festival, so people rock up, share their Cob Loaf with everybody and then people who want to contribute otherwise, they can chuck in ten bucks or so at the gate,” Mr McKay said.
“After the world championships are announced, everybody will be sitting next to their cob and people will get to ask them about it and have a taste of it.”
Amateur cob-makers will also get a chance to shine on festival day, with cob making tutorials for newcomers and beginners to participate in.
But as far as crowd participation, McKay thinks that once again it’ll be the highly touted dessert category that gets the most interest.
“It’ll be a very popular category, it’s obviously the one people gravitated towards eating, it definitely grabbed people’s imagination last year,” Mr McKay said.
“I was speaking to someone earlier and they said what goes into making a good cob loaf and basically, it’s imagination, people come up with some amazing ideas.”
The festival will begin at 4pm and finish up by 9pm that evening.
