DeRusha's Best: The 26-year old "senior citizen" that took home best chocolate chip cookie at the Minnesota State Fair

There is no shortage of food at the Minnesota State Fair, and that includes some pretty famous chocolate cookies courtesy of a lady named Martha who's built a little empire in Falcon Heights.

But there are more than just those ubiquitous buckets you see hauled through the fairgrounds every August. There are blue ribbon winning cookies, cakes, breads and more. We met the banana bread winner the other day who won "DeRusha's Best" in addition to that ribbon on WCCO's Drivetime with DeRusha . He's not done though.

Now meet Madeline Poultridge, the blue ribbon chocolate chip cookie winner, and the second recipient of "DeRusha's Best".

So, was Poultridge expecting to win? Of course not.

"I was not expecting to place," she told DeRusha. "I was telling you earlier, I was recruited by my housemate. She got me, her and like five or six other people, we all entered chocolate chip cookies because as you know, it's very competitive. Competition is fierce."

There were almost 200 entries in the chocolate chip cookie category.

"We were trying to crack the top 25 because that's when you get the little scorecard," Poultridge says. "So we were trying to figure out what the judges wanted. My housemate Molly she's been entering for a couple of years has not gotten the feedback, was like, 'I've got to know.' So we're all gonna enter, we're gonna collect this data."

The results were posted online, but Poultridge explained that she didn't want to know until she got to the Fair last Thursday and could see in person what happened, even forcing her coworkers to keep a "poker face" so they didn't give it away.

"So I have a funny picture of them all like crowded around the computer looking, but they kept a poker face," she said. "They didn't let on."

When she got to the Fair, Poultridge didn't check on her cookie entry first. Instead, she went to the Creative Arts Building where she had submitted a shawl in the knitting category. Did that win?

"It did, not to toot my own horn," she joked.

So Madeline Poultridge, all of 26-years old, is a State Fair Blue Ribbon winner in cookies and knitting, as you'd expect.

"I was excited about that and then we were walking and I was like, 'there's no way because it's huge.' As soon as we got on the fairgrounds, I was like, it's too big," she said about the cookie entry. "There's no way, there's so many people, and then we got to the cookies and it had the little blue ribbon. Yeah, it was really exciting."

Poultridge says the cookie recipe she uses comes from her father who also won a blue ribbon with it in her original hometown of Olympia, Washington.

"I was like, I have a pretty good recipe, but Olympia, Washington is small potatoes compared to the Minnesota State Fair," Poultridge says in a not-kissing-up kind of way to Minnesotans.

"But like we'll give it a shot," she adds. "He's a culinary school graduate, he was a chef for a long time. Then he had kids and he became a librarian but he loves to cook, he loves to bake. He spent a long time tweaking it."

Is there a secret to this recipe?

"The secret I feel is oat flour," she says. "Not entirely oat flour but like, probably like two parts? I'm not good enough at math. It makes like a nice, I think the best thing about chocolate chip cookies is the toastiness. I feel like it's a very toasty flavored."

Part of why that comes through is the brown butter in the recipe too.

"I think that the oat flour gives like a nice toasty flavor, it gives it more interesting texture and it makes it like, it's kind of like a spray tan vibe," says Poultridge. "It adds just more of like a golden-like color to it that I think is really nice."

Spray tan vibe cookies might be straight from the 26-year old but Poultridge really embraces her "old lady vibes" too.

"I'm already a senior citizen. I'm gonna be so powerful when I'm 80," she told DeRusha. "I think there's somewhat of a generational thing. In the past women were maybe expected to have certain hobbies and then were, later on, maybe people rejected those because they didn't feel like they wanted to feel forced into that. And I think a really cool thing now is that you can just do whatever you want. I can knit a shawl, but I can do whatever."

Now she can count herself a winner of a blue ribbon for cookies (and a shawl), plus a proud recipient of "DeRusha's Best". All at the ripe old age of 26.

RECIPE: Andrew + Madeline's CCC's

1.5C AP flour

1C oat flour (not rolled oats!!)

1tsp baking soda

Healthy pinch of salt

1C salted butter, browned and cooled

3/4C brown sugar

1/2C sugar

Vanilla (measure with your heart)

2 eggs, room temp

2C chocolate chips (I like a mix of sizes as well as milk + dark)

AHEAD OF TIME: brown butter and set aside to cool to room temp.

DRY INGREDIENTS: combine and mix thoroughly with a fork or whisk

WET INGREDIENTS: cream sugar + butter. Add eggs + vanilla one at a time, mixing thoroughly between each. Scrape your bowl!

COMBINE: add dry ingredients to wet ingredients and mix until just combined. Add chocolate chips.

SCOOP: (if it's a hot day, you might need to chill dough for an hour or two first) scoop into balls with a 1.5Tbsp scoop or however big you like. A 1.5Tbsp scoop makes 36 cookies. Chill or freeze dough balls before baking for best results, but bake right away if it's a cookie emergency.

BAKE: 350 degrees for 15 minutes.