Four Dallas-area cooks are finalists in Pillsbury Bake-Off, to take place in Dallas in April

by Teresa Gubbins

Four Dallas-area cooks made the list of 100 finalists for the bi-annual 43rd Pillsbury Bake-Off Contest, which will be held this year in Dallas, from April 13-15 at the Fairmont Hotel.

Thousands of entries are submitted to the Bake-Off, the big kahuna of cooking contests with a $1 million prize for the winner. The most recent winner was a Texan: Anna Ginsberg of Austin won the bake-off in 2006 with her novel Baked Chicken and Spinach Stuffing, which used frozen waffle sticks in the stuffing.

The four local finalists are:

• Stephanie Hollowell of Dallas for her Fudgy Chocolate-Peanut Butter Thumbprints
• Frances Pietsch of Flower Mound for her Mango-Jalapeño-Chicken Salad in Cumin Tortilla Bowls
• Gwen Beauchamp of Lancaster for her Toffee-Banana Brownies
• Robin Hill of Arlington for her Spinach and Mushroom Enchiladas with Creamy Red Sauce.

If you hit the Web site and vote for your favorite recipe/candidate, you have a chance to win $1 million yourself. One voter will be randomly drawn, and if that voter picked the winner, the voter gets $1 million, too. The odds are pretty slim but it doesn't require much effort to vote, either. Come on, quit having such a bad attitude about winning $1 million.