Indiana State Fair 2026 Photos, Part 4: The Year in Cakes

Giant cake shaped like a small burger, fries, hot dog, chocolate ice cream bar, and caramel apple all stacked on one massive burger.

No, this isn’t a Taste of the Fair dish or a Man v. Food eating challenge. This is a single cake.

It’s that time again! The Indiana State Fair is an annual celebration of Hoosier pride, farming, food, and 4-H, with amusement park rides, cooking demos, concerts by musicians either nearly or formerly popular, and farm animals competing for cash prizes without their knowledge. My wife Anne and I attend each year as a date-day to seek new forms of creativity and imagination within a local context…

…such as cakes! Back in 2019 we discovered for the first time in our entire fair-attending lives that the main 4-H Building wasn’t their only exhibit hall. Next door Centennial Hall was formerly a dormitory — and is still inaccurately and unhelpfully labeled as such — and contained entire competitive categories that we’d never seen before. The cakes in particular were awesome sights to behold.

Then the State Fair went on hiatus in 2020, because 2020. Without that annual reinforcement of the lesson we’d learned, we totally forgot about Centennial Hall until this year. We were only pointed toward it because the contents of the main 4-H Building were restructured, rearranged, and/or relocated elsewhere. For some reason the entire second floor appeared to have been converted into an indoor driving range for 4-H golfers. Thankfully we were redirected to Centennial Hall and discovered the joy of 4-H cakes all over again — the results of hours of effort, imagination and concentration on the part of whoever was blessed with these amazing colossal talents. A shame we couldn’t eat any of their works, merely behold them. Call it the Great Hoosier Bake-Off.

Green cake shaped like a baseball field.

Victory Field cake, based on the home of our own minor-league Indianapolis Indians.

2-layer cake with icing baseball and mitt on top.

Officially this year’s fair’s theme was The Year of Baseball, but we didn’t capture a lot of relevant references. This one’s from the Indiana Arts Building.