Patience serves 2018 cookie contest winner well
“For me this is cathartic, the whole process of baking,” said Mike Behringer as he demonstrated how to make his winning cookie for a Journal Sentinel video. “Rolling out dough is really calming.”
The resident of Milwaukee’s east side, who works as digital asset specialist for Kohl’s, is also blessed with patience.
“In my family it’s a running joke that patience skips a generation,” he said. “My grandfather was extremely patient. My dad wasn’t.”
This is a good thing, because his first-place Cranberry Chai Swirls are not a cookie you can just whip up when you have an hour to spare. He insists that his recipe, which won the Layered Wonders category of our 2018 Holiday Cookie Contest and also Best of Show, is not difficult; but as you can see from the space it takes up on page 4, it does have a lot of steps.
First you make cranberry-orange jam. Then you mix and chill two doughs: gingersnap and orange cardamom. Then you roll out the doughs, stack them, spread with jam, roll it all up, freeze the roll, then finally slice and bake.
But the effort is worth it, yielding a striking, multicolored pinwheel cookie that tastes of gingerbread and orange and cranberry and cardamom in every bite.
Behringer’s patience also serves him well for his signature baking items, homemade breads and rolls. The self-taught baker has two starters in the fridge from yeast grown from juniper berries that he foraged in the Kettle Moraine Forest. He’s also grown starters from yeast in the air.
And he’s made croissants, a three-day ordeal. “I’m very proud of that,” he said. “I like to challenge myself.”
Cookies are a relatively new project. Last year his Buttered Rum-pa-pum-pums took second place overall in his debut year in the Holiday Cookie Contest. Did he set out this year to win it all?
“Almost right away last year, Avis said, you know, this means you have to win next year,” Behringer said, referring to his friend, Avis Chmielewski, the 2017 and 2015 contest winner, who encouraged him to enter last year. She could not submit cookies this year because she was a judge. (Finalists are judged blind, no names attached.)
Yet Behringer said he spent most of his time this year on the other cookie he entered, Christmas Mornings, which didn’t place. His winning spiral cookie went through several iterations, first involving poppy seeds, then pomegranate, then pomegranate-cranberry jam — a great pairing but not one that worked with the other flavors in the cookie, he said.
Finally, he gave up on the pomegranate and decided to add orange to both the cardamom dough (cardamom being his all-time favorite spice) and the cranberry jam. He took that version to work, and it was met with universal thumbs-up.
His was the last cookie entry to arrive, just before the deadline on Thursday of contest week.
Behringer shared a couple of tips for aspiring cookie bakers.
“Baking is really not an expensive hobby,” he said. For that reason, “don’t be too invested in the mistakes.”
“Don’t be afraid to buy ingredients in bulk, and accept that you’re going to throw some away. With time and practice, it will all come together.”
He buys flour 50 pounds at a time and seeks out Von Kiel butter (“the best tasting”) in 1-pound bricks. Also, don’t be a slave to recipes, he advised. “I’m not really a recipe follower,” he said, while admitting that he knows Julia Child’s piecrust recipe by heart. “I might make a recipe once, but then I feel compelled to make it my own.”
To watch Behringer demonstrate how to make his Cranberry Chai Swirls, see