It was a warm summer day but Malorie Thorson was dressed for winter as Gerry Kulzer sculpted a likeness of her head from a large block of butter Thursday in keeping with a 60-year-old tradition on the opening day of the Minnesota State Fair.

Thorson, a 20-year-old from the town of Waverly, was crowned as the 72nd Princess Kay of the Milky Way on Wednesday night. And her first official duty as the goodwill ambassador for the state's 1,800 dairy farm families was to bundle up and sit in a rotating glassed-in studio at 40 degrees F (4 Celsius) as fairgoers gathered to watch Kulzer turn a 90-pound (41-kilogram) block of salted butter into art.

Wearing her tiara on her head, her sash over her overcoat and her gloves folded on her lap, Thorson said she loved the break from the nearly 80 degree (27 Celsius) heat outside.

But she added it was an “unreal experience” to find herself at the center of attention because her mother had been taking her to the fair and its dairy stands since she was at least 3. She said her mother had been a Princess Kay finalist in 1996.

“Right now, I’m using Linda Christensen’s knife,” Kulzer told Thorson, referencing the fair’s previous butter sculptor of fifty years. “So your mom was in the butter booth, this same butter booth with this same knife when she was carved.”

Other state fairs also feature butter sculptures. The Iowa State Fair has been famous for its life-sized Butter Cow for over a century. A replica will be displayed at the Smithsonian Institution's Renwick Gallery in Washington starting Saturday. The 2025 New York State Fair butter sculpture, unveiled Tuesday, is a 900-pound (410-kilogram) nod to the 125th anniversary of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” by New York state native L. Frank Baum.

But in Minnesota, all 10 of the dairy princess finalists get a likeness of their heads carved before an ever-changing live audience. Each one gets to take their sculpture home after the fair, along with a bucket of the scraps. They can deep-freeze their heads as souvenirs or share them with family and friends, maybe spreading some of the butter onto corn on the cob.

“Iowa and these other places, they start with an armature and layer the butter on top. That's what we do when we're making something for bronze sculpture. This is more like a carving stone like Michelangelo did. And they're both valid, but this is the only fair that you're going to see someone live sculpting from a solid block of butter,” said Kulzer.