What Happens To All Of The Butter Sculptures After The Fair?
FALCON HEIGHTS, Minn. (WCCO) -- It's one of the most popular exhibits at the Minnesota State Fair – the 12 butter sculptures of the Dairy Princesses and Princess Kay of the Milky Way. Each sculpture starts as a 90-lb block of butter and takes between six and eight hours from start to finish.
But, what happens to all of that butter after the Fair? Good Question.
"It's a good question and one we get asked all the time," says Theresa Reps, spokesperson for the Midwest Dairy Association. "Each person is different."
Each Princess gets to keep her sculpture as well as the scraps that come with the carving.
This year's Princess Kay, Emily Annexstad, isn't sure yet what she's going to do with her sculpture, but says her family is already using the scraps at home.
Some Princesses have baked cookies to send to the troops. Maddie Lindahl, a 2017 Dairy Princess from Lindstrom, is considering a community movie night with buttered popcorn.
Reps, who was a Dairy Princess in 2011, says she had a community corn feed and then her family used what was left over. That took two and a half years.
"What's really cool is if you freeze butter, it lasts longer," Reps says.
A special David Letterman butter sculpture made it all the way out to New York City in the 1900s. It never made it on-air, but was used for butter spreads on bread outside of the studio.
And, finally, a Dairy Princess could just keep the sculpture. Donna Schmidt (now Moenning) was a 1980 Princess Kay Finalist from Marietta, MN. She has kept hers in the freezer since then.
"At this point, what do you do with it?" she laughed.