Cookies

Margaret Stannard was calm as she held her husband’s hand in the back of the ambulance.  Will was smiling in his semi-conscious state, which might have been surprising to anyone else, but not to her.  If this wound proved fatal, he would die as happy as he had ever been.  It did not escape her that it was not she, his wife of twenty-three years, who had brought about this happiness, but she had long ago accepted that his passion for her came second to the great love and driving ambition of his life.

Less than an hour earlier, Will Stannard had been crowned Grand Champion of the Twenty-First Annual Northeast Regional Amateur Cookie Competition, the most prestigious award on the American cookie circuit.  What's more, it was his fourth Grand Champion’s Cup, breaking a tie with Mabel Grover.  Mabel, who had retired from entering the competitions five years ago to become Director of the Cookie Judge Certification Program, as well as Organizer of the annual NRACC, was the one who had driven the steak knife into Will’s chest at the cocktail party following the awards ceremony.

Margaret was sure that Will was chortling happily in his sedated state, not only because of his victory over his hated rival, but because Mabel, who had been led away in handcuffs, would almost certainly never have the opportunity to un-retire in an attempt to threaten his status as the champion of champions.  Only two other bakers had won the title of Grand Champion, and only one apiece, so it might be years before some young hotshot threatened his title.

As they sped through the streets of Boston, Margaret pondered the long, twisted history of this storied rivalry.  Will and Mabel had once been good friends, and had worked together with curmudgeonly Nate Carlisle to create and sustain this annual competition.

There were, of course, other cookie competitions all across the country.  But Nate Carlisle had insisted that they set standards higher than anyone in the country had ever aspired to.  Only Certified Judges and professional bakers would judge the entries, there would be strict category guidelines and recipe requirements that must be adhered to, and, perhaps most importantly, the definition of “amateur” would be clear, precise, and inviolable.  Thus far, only the Kansas City and Toronto competitions had accepted and adhered to the same standards, so any notion of a “National” or “North American” champion was totally disregarded by the cookie bakers in the Northeast.  To them the Northeast Circuit was the only one that mattered.

Margaret smiled as she remembered the good times and the bad.  It had been such fun in those early years, as Will, Nate and Mabel worked together to create something special.  It was a great team:  Nate with the vision, the ideal, and the impossibly high standards; Will, who knew how to reconcile ideals with realities; and Mabel, whose social contacts ranged from her vegetarian cuisine club to a Boston - area private investment group.  Together, they made this high-standards cookie competition a lasting success.

Nate was not an active competitor, at his age, but Will and Mabel were very active.  In fact, it almost seemed sometimes that they had organized this cookie circuit for their own benefit.  One of Nate’s ideas was to hand out a Grand Champion Cup only when a baker won both the Baker of the Year award, for the most points in all categories, and Best of Show at the NRACC.  Will had not achieved that prestigious double until 2012, but Mabel had won it three times in the first decade of the NRACC.

Mabel’s success had fed her already substantial opinion of herself, and, as she distanced herself more and more from the “County Fair” bakers who made up the bulk of the entrants, she began, ipso facto, to be seen as the leader of the “elitist” wing of the Northeast Circuit.  It caused a rift between Will and Mabel, who expected her friend to agree with her on everything.

Then there was the great “Right to Bake” controversy in 2008, in which hundreds of bakers across the East had protested that they were being squeezed out by the wealthy, who could afford to rent condos in the Boston area, or, in one case, even rent space in a commercial bakery for a week before the annual competition, giving them a huge advantage over the bakers who had to sacrifice freshness and risk catastrophic damage by shipping their cookies to the event.  Lawyers had been involved, unions, state legislators, and, unfortunately, there had even been a couple of arrests.  The Governor of Vermont had even threatened to call out the National Guard when a small army of irate bakers had stormed the Capitol building in Montpelier.

It had been a public relations nightmare.  But they had worked through it.  Nate Carlisle had risen to the challenge and come up with a solution which, if not perfect, was workable.  Working with local cookie clubs from Pennsylvania to Maine, he agreed to certify six regional competitions as preliminary events, as long as they agreed to use the same standards as the NRACC.  Points scored in these competitions, both in individual categories and in Best-of-Show, would count towards the Baker of the Year title, decided at the NRACC in October.  But to be Grand Champion, a baker still had to win both Baker of the Year and Best of Show in Boston.  To make it easier for distant bakers to enter their cookies in Boston, Nate used a grant from a well-known cookbook author and annual subsidies from King Arthur and Pillsbury to set up a delivery service.  The cookie bakers would bring their carefully packaged entries to drop-off points, where they would be loaded in vans and driven overnight to Boston, to arrive early Saturday morning.  The rich still had an advantage, but it was mitigated somewhat.

Will had been a strong advocate and a powerful voice for the “County Fair” bakers during the controversy, and it had widened the rift between him and Mabel Grover into a chasm.  A couple of years later, Mabel  and a few of her cronies had tried to introduce a two-tiered competition model, which would have given the “elite bakers” a separate, and more prestigious, level of competition, open only to those with proven qualifications.  This, Will contended, went very much against the principles on which the Northeast Circuit and the NRACC had been founded.  The proposal was shot down, leaving a residue of bitter resentment, at least on Mabel’s part.  When Will won the first of his Grand Champion’s Cups in 2012, Mabel read his celebratory exuberance as a slap in the face and a personal affront.      

Then there had been the disastrous 2013 competition.  Disastrous for Will Stannard, that is.  He had failed to garner a single first place at the Boston competition, and thus had had no entry for the Best of Show, and his fourth place finish in the Baker of the Year standings was his lowest ever.  Six of his entries had been judged by Mabel Grover, and each of them had received uncharacteristically low scores.  Will had been convinced that Mabel had found out that they were his entries (judges were not supposed to know whose entries they were judging) and deliberately sabotaged him.  Margaret had had to hustle him out of the post-award cocktail party before he could cause a scene.

Of course, he had come back in spectacular fashion.  Retiring to rest on her laurels from an executive position, with three career Grand Championships, Mabel Grover had watched Will Stannard crowned Grand Champion (in fact, had handed him his cups) in 2014, 2016, and earlier today at the 2019 competition.  The two once-close friends had become the bitterest of rivals, and now it had come to this – Will Stannard being rushed to Emergency with a potentially fatal stab wound, inflicted by Mabel Grover.

Will’s day had started in typical fashion; typical for an obsessed cookie competitor, that is.  Up at 4:00 A.M. to bake two final batches of cookies while Margaret began carefully packing the entries baked the day before.  It was a routine they had practiced scores of times, and their preparation and execution were faultless.  At 6:15, the van was on the road, leaving Loudon on the way to Boston.

When they arrived at the hotel at 7:20, dozens of volunteers, under the supervision of Serge Toussaint, the Chief Steward, were busily unloading other vans, cars, and trucks, all carrying cookies.  It was an incredibly complicated process, in which several hundred entries, of six cookies each, must be catalogued, and must end up stacked in a carefully guarded room, organized by categories and assigned entry numbers, and several hundred entry forms must end up in the Chief Steward’s office, where he, and he alone, would have the chart that connected the numbered entries to the individual bakers.

It was a process that could reasonably take an entire morning, but, with the emphasis on freshness that Nate Carlisle and his cronies had insisted on, they made it work in about two hours.  Many entries, over a hundred, had already arrived, having been shipped via UPS or FedEx, but the majority of the cookies to be judged today had been baked in the last two days, and arrived at the competition site between 6:00 and 8:00 A.M.  Judging would begin at 9:00 sharp.

The judges and stewards, most of whom were cookie bakers themselves, were served breakfast in the hotel’s dining room while a separate crew, under Serge Toussaint’s direction, finished preparing flight sheets and double-checking panel assignments for judges and stewards.  Many had entries themselves, so it was essential that no judge or steward be accidentally assigned to a panel that included his or her own cookies.  Such things happened in other cookie competitions, but never in the NRACC.

Will had a modest breakfast of eggs, homefries and toast, with coffee.  He sat with three other judges, each of whom, like he, had several entries.  They talked about their cookies of course, but guardedly.  Each of them had been given a preliminary category assignment for the morning session, subject, of course, to final review by the Chief Steward and Judge Coordinator.  No one wanted to be accused of trying to influence someone he or she knew would be judging his or her cookies, so no details could be discussed that might serve to identify an entry.

When they strolled into the adjoining conference room where the judging tables were set up, Will found, to his delight, that his judging partner for the morning session was Mary Anne Maple, one of his favorites.  Mary Ann was a thirty-ish married woman from North Jersey who had been crowned Grand Champion in 2015.  She was thin, bespectacled and very plain-looking until she smiled.  Her smile was immensely charming and she seemed to like everyone.  Thus, it was practically impossible not to like her.

Within minutes, Will, Mary Ann, and their steward, whose name badge identified him as Jerry, were laughing gaily and having fun as they went through their entries and decided in which order to judge them.  Their category was Chocolate Chip, which pleased all three of them.  It would have pleased all but a few of those present, those few being the snooty, upper-crust bakers like Joe Butler, from Atlanta, and Luther Purvis, from Kansas City, and Mabel Grover herself.  Fancy bakers like them regarded chocolate chip cookies as plebian, and ordinary.  But the majority of competitors were down-home cookie makers who belonged to village “bakers’ circles” and entered State and County Fair competitions, and they loved to create exciting variations on America’s favorite cookie, or simply to try and make the best possible traditional classic.  That’s why, of the three hundred forty seven entries in the 2019 NRACC, fifty five were chocolate chip cookies.

There were three sub-categories in Chocolate Chip:  Traditional/Crisp, Traditional/Soft, and Specialty.   Traditional cookies must be made with white flour, dark or milk chocolate chips, and must not contain any nuts or fruit.  Any cookie that strayed from the traditional parameters was a “specialty.”  

Most of the cookie categories had more manageable numbers of entries, and would be judged to a first, second, and third, and that was it, but, with so many entries, the chocolate chip category was split into six flights, with each panel forwarding their best entries to the final panel for the category, to be held in the afternoon.  Will and Mary Ann had ended up with three T/C’s, four T/S’s, and two specialties, and they decided to judge them in that same order.

What made judging with Mary Ann so much fun was that she never failed to enjoy herself, and her pleasure was infectious, at least, to most people.  She herself was a superb technical baker, and she could analyze any cookie in technical terms as well as any judge in the country.  But she never failed to appreciate the subtleties, the intangibles, the non-technical things that made a cookie special.  And she was never mean.  One of the purported reasons for the judging and for the score sheets was to give helpful feedback to amateur bakers.  A lot of judges – far too many – never bothered to fill in the feedback section, but Mary Ann always did.

The three T/C’s were nothing special, with none scoring higher than thirty out of the possible fifty points, but Will and Mary Ann managed to find something nice to say about each.  The T/S’s were better, with two scoring thirty-eight and forty.  Both would be very likely advanced to the next round.

The two specialties were a lot of fun.  The first did not score especially well, as its combination of flavors did not really meld that well, but it was a bold and innovative attempt.

“You know,” Mary Ann said, “the buttermilk batter with dark chocolate chips is a great combination, but pomegranate was never the right fruit for this.”

“You’re right; almost any other fruit would have worked better.”

The last cookie, another specialty, was the best they had tasted.

“Always nice when it happens that way, isn’t it?” Mary Ann asked with a big smile.

The combination of finely chopped walnuts and dark chocolate chips was in perfect balance, and there was a tang in the dough that had Will momentarily puzzled.  But Mary Ann got it right away.

“I swear there’s cream cheese in this dough,” she said.

“Yes! Yes, of course.  I’ve been trying to identify what it reminds me of, and it’s Rugelach!  It’s a Rugelach dough, with chips and walnuts, and baked flat, instead of rolled up.”

“You’re right, Will, and there’s just the right touch of walnut extract in there.  This is really good.”

They ended up scoring the walnut/chocolate chip specialty a forty-four, and promoted that and the two better TS’s to the afternoon panel, then sat and enjoyed the hubbub for a while.  Many of the other panels had finished, as well, but more were still judging.  Lunch wouldn’t be served for another half hour, so most of those who had finished sat quietly, like Will and Mary Ann, and watched and listened.  It was either that or get up and leave the room, so as not to disturb the working judges.

A couple of tables away, the peanut butter panel was led by Joe Butler, from Atlanta, always known as Dr. Joseph P. Butler III, M.D. on the entry sheets or score sheets, or anything written, but known by almost all the veteran judges on the circuit as “PP#1.”  The letters stood for Pompous Prick.  As usual, he could be heard all over the room.  His voice had a cutting quality that made it stand out even when it wasn’t the loudest sound.

“Ridiculous!” he was saying, “Why do they even bother?” while he dashed the poor entrant’s hopes with biting ridicule and a brutal score.  His judging partner, as usual, was a veteran of mediocre standing.  Butler didn’t like to judge with the top talents, like Will, Mary Ann, Purvis, and a few others, who were too good to be intimidated by him.  On the other hand, someone had once, at a regional competition, paired him with a young judge who didn’t know enough to be cowed, and the guy had jumped up and floored him with one punch.  So the Judge Coordinators were careful now to put him with someone he could dominate.

“PP#2” was on the far side of the room, judging Macaroons.  He was Luther Purvis, the wealthy Kansas Cityan who had been crowned Grand Champion in 2017.  His style was the quiet, deadly hiss, and the brief, but devastating put-down on the score sheet.  He was sure to be ripping someone to shreds at the moment, but his voice would never rise to a level that could be heard beyond his own table.

Will and Mary Ann sat and talked softly about the competition.  She let him know immediately that she had no entries in the competition, which was a bit of a surprise.  She had been competing for years, and had achieved the Grand Championship once, and now her competitive fires were not burning so fiercely.

“I won some ribbons earlier in the season,” she explained, “in the regionals, but it was mostly with new ideas – new recipes or variations that I wanted to try out.  I don’t need to beat the world anymore.”

It was important for her to tell him that right up front.  Unlike Will, or either of the PP’s, who almost always had first-place cookies in the Best-of-Show, she would be eligible to sit on the Best-of-Show judging panel, and, given her status on the cookie circuit, she was very likely to be selected.  She was letting him know not to talk about his entries in any detail, in case she would be judging them later.

Lunch was a time to relax for the judges, and share some of their morning flight experiences, cautiously, of course.  Will had an egg salad sandwich and some potato chips with Mary Ann, while they listened to some of the banter.  Joe Butler was never hesitant to publicly ridicule the unfortunate bakers, names unknown, who had fallen victim to his vastly superior taste buds and impeccable knowledge of the craft.  Many of the others present enjoyed listening to his bombast, but not these two.  Fortunately, PP#1 was enough of a competition purist that he would never publicly discuss any of the really good entries he judged; the ones that had a chance for Best-of-Show.

Meanwhile, Serge Toussaint and his stewards were extremely busy between judging sessions.  Most of them had taken the opportunity to grab something to eat when they had a chance.  The finished flights had to be logged into the computer, the tables cleaned and reset, and the afternoon flights set up to be judged. 

But for Serge Toussaint and his assistant, Jimmy, the afternoon was filled with tedium of a different sort.  Part of what made the Northeast Circuit, and the NRACC in particular, so special was the exacting integrity of the process, and part of that was recipe review.  It was impossible to check every single recipe, in a competition this large.  But Serge, a retired accountant, had a system.  He and his assistant would randomly select twenty-five entry sheets and review the recipe, which was required to be attached, to make sure ingredient and process specifications, both general and specific to that category, had been followed.  In addition to the random review, the entry sheet for each first place entry would be pulled and reviewed.

It had to be done with a considerable degree of care and concentration, so it took time.  Most of them were done by three o’clock, when the first of the afternoon flights came in.  Jimmy took care of the paperwork for the finished flights while Serge continued with the random reviews.  But, by three-thirty, the judging results were coming in fast, so both of them had to work on those, while the recipes waited.

The afternoon session was nearly as pleasant for Will as the morning had been.  His partner for Shortbread Cookies was Bud DeCorreau, from Maine, another baker/judge who Will liked very much.  Bud was a very good baker and a better judge.  He had won his regional in Portland several times, but had never finished higher than third in the Baker of the Year standings.  The judges like Butler, Purvis, and Mabel Grover considered him a “lightweight,” who could never measure up to stars like themselves.  Luther Purvis had once said of him, at a cocktail party, “He doesn’t have the ‘killer instinct.’”  Joe Butler and Mabel Grover had thought that a brilliant remark, but Will had been disgusted.       

The room felt a little more tense in the afternoon, as always.  So many of the judges were entrants, and they all knew that their own entries were being judged, maybe at the next table.  Some of them had contrived to discover how their entries had fared in the morning flights, and that made the afternoon session more relaxing for some, less so for others.

Will and Bud finished about four-fifteen, crowning a splendid Traditional Shortbread Cookie with their blue ribbon.  They stepped into the adjoining dining room, where Bud’s wife, Linda, was waiting.  Linda gave Bud a big hug, and greeted Will just as warmly.

“Is Margaret coming?” she asked.

“She’ll be here a little later; you know she hates the Best-of-Show judging.”

“Oh, yes, I know,” she said, with a laugh, “’The Parade of Egos’ she calls it.  It’s more fun when she’s here, though.”  She gave Bud’s hand a big squeeze and asked him “How do think you’re doing, hon?”

“Oh, there’s no way to know, honey.”

“He’s made the best chocolate chip specialty ever, Will.”

Bud and Will were both embarrassed, but she just shrugged and said, “You know there’s no way Will is on the Best-of-Show panel, so what does it matter?”

Will wanted to step outside for a breath and call Margaret, so he made his excuses and left.

In the Chief Steward’s room, the last flight came in at about four-thirty.  It was crunch time now, and Serge logged in the final results, with first, second, and third places awarded.  Jimmy prepared the flight sheet for Best of Show while the stewards broke down the judging tables and set up the long BOS table with five seats at one end of the room.

The Judge Coordinator came in with his clipboard.  His next task was to assemble the judging panel for Best-of-Show.  He had his list of judges, and his list included what categories each judge had entries in.  Between him and Serge, they were able to eliminate those judges who had first place entries, and he then left to start canvassing prospective judges.

Two of the panel of five were pre-determined.  Mabel Grover would, naturally, sit in her chosen “seat of power,” at the right end of the long table, and Emma Cookson-Baker would sit in the center.  Emma was the representative of King Arthur Flour, one of the primary sponsors of the NRACC, and of the whole Northeast Circuit.  It had been decided long ago to have at least one professional baker for the BOS panel, and Emma had let it be known that she wished it to be her.  So she would sit in the center, where she would be the focus, she imagined, of everyone’s attention.  As expected, Mary Ann Maple was asked to sit on the panel, and she graciously accepted.

The Judge Coordinator selected, with Mabel Grover’s approval, two men to fill out the panel.  Bill Stempel was an amiable baker/judge from Pennsylvania with extensive judging experience, and Walt Jernowicz, from Providence, was a sort of PP#3 in training – a fat, pompous jerk who wasn’t as widely known and hated as the other Pompous Pricks, mainly because he wasn’t that good a baker.

This was the format for Best-of-Show:  each of the five judges would be served a sample of every first place cookie, with its category number clearly indicated.  They would have copies of the style guidelines at hand, although most of the judges had enough experience (read: arrogance) that they professed not to need them.  For the first fifteen minutes, or so, they would nibble their way through the entries, making notes, until they had all sampled each one.  Then, with Mabel acting as Master of Ceremonies, they would, one by one, be asked to knockout an entry from consideration.

This was the “Parade of Egos” that Margaret Stannard so hated.  Will hated it, too, but what they hated about it was what most people loved – that it was public.  Too many BOS judges spent too much time displaying their own expertise and incredibly good taste, talking back and forth about this or that baking technique, or the great examples of a particular style they had sampled in Paris, and which this poor entry could never measure up to.  It was up to Mabel to keep things moving along by cutting short these unnecessary theatrics, and she did a reasonably good job, except when she was the one talking.       

Will had called Margaret from the sidewalk outside the hotel, and then spent about ten minutes just walking up and down the street.  He would go in and look at the list of first place entries; he could usually tell with a fair degree of certainty which entries were his.  He had three that were unlike anyone else’s, and he thought he might have two other firsts.  After that, it was just a matter of waiting; he had no interest in the judge’s comments until they got to the end.

When Margaret arrived, the panel had worked their way down to six entries.  She and Will walked into the crowded room and sat down with Bud and Linda, who had saved places for them.  Linda was all smiles, happy to see Margaret and very optimistic about her husband’s chances.

“Six left,” she said, “and I’m sure one of them is Bud’s.”

The six entries remaining were:  a Snickerdoodle, a Nut Flour/Ground Nuts, a Filled Cookie, a Chocolate Chip, an International, and a Decorated.  Will was pleased, believing that three of them were his, and that the Chocolate Chip was Bud’s. 

Bud and Linda told them of a few interesting knockouts, and some amusing comments, but they were really only interested in what would happen next.

The Viennese Crescents, made with ground hazelnuts, were knocked out next.  It was Will’s, of course; he had been baking that cookie since 2008, and had won several ribbons with it.  Originally entered as an International, it was now a standard in many bakers’ repertoires, but no one could match Will’s expertise with it.  The judges were probably sick of seeing it in the top three.

Out went the Snickerdoodle, and there was some commotion on the other side of the room as a disgruntled baker got up and left.

The Filled Cookie, which was a sandwich of crisp chocolate shortbread, a soft, white almond cookie, and a tart cherry compote, was finally eliminated, which was disappointing to Will, but it still left him in the top three.

At this stage, the judges’ comments were along the usual lines:  “these are all great cookies,” and “we’re just nit-picking now,” and that sort of thing.  The three remaining were very different, so there was no kind of head-to-head comparison possible.

Decorated Cookies often made it to the top three, because of their visual appeal.  Will disliked judging them because, all too often, underneath all the fancy work was a rather mediocre sugar cookie.  But this one, according to the panel, was absolutely delicious.  The Chocolate Chip Specialty, Bud’s creation, was warmly praised for its delightful cream cheese tang and its perfect balance.  The Mantecado, the first place International, was something else again, with its shortbread-like texture and the subtle flavors of almond and anise.

As Will had very much hoped, none of the BOS judges had ever tasted this Spanish cookie before, and they loved it.  After a few minutes of wrangling and ranking, the judges agreed:  the Decorated Cookie in third, the Chocolate Chip Specialty in second, and the Mantecado would be the Best-of-Show winner.

Will and Margaret were ecstatic, but they deliberately kept their celebration as restrained as they could.  Will did not trust Mabel Grover at all, and he didn’t want her to know it was his entry until the last possible moment.  Margaret had whispered it to Bud and Linda long before, so they knew.  Bud had never finished this high in the NRACC before, and although his dream of Best-of-Show in Boston would have to wait, he was delighted for his friend.

In the Stewards’ room, the assistant was finishing up the last couple of recipes, while Serge stood in the back of the judging room, waiting for the signal.  Serge heard the final results, and stood stock-still while he waited for the BOS panel to sign off on the results and send them back to him.  He kept a straight face while he accepted the paperwork, and maintained it all the way back to the Stewards’ room.

Then he exploded with laughter, reverting, as he sometimes did, to his native tongue, “Merde!  Merde! Oh, she’s going to shit, Jimmy!  How she’s going to shit!”

Jimmy gaped in astonishment at his boss, who had to sit and gather himself.  It only took a minute, then he directed his assistant to get out the big Grand Champion’s Cup.

“Yes, Jimmy, Will Stannard’s done it again.”

The crowd of judges, bakers, and spectators were quickly moving from the judging room into the adjoining dining room, which had been totally reset.  There was a podium at the head of the room, and a long table for the ribbons and awards.  Tables had been set for groups of two and four, with a few larger, at request, and two buffet tables were covered with hot and cold hors d’oeuvres, and, most important, a portable bar had been set up, where a grinning bartender was ready to serve.

While the crowd got their drinks and settled into their seats, Mabel Grover chatted with Emma Cookson-Baker and Luther Purvis next to the podium.  Mabel’s table was close by, and her guests put their handbags and things at the table while Mabel’s husband brought their drinks.  After a few minutes, Serge Toussaint and two of the stewards came in carrying the boxes of ribbons and a final awards sheet for Mabel to read from as she presented.

Serge was stone-faced as he directed the two stewards, but Mabel was nervously watching him.  She knew that Will Stannard was virtually certain to have enough points to win Baker of the Year again, and, if that wonderful Spanish creation was his, she would be handing him the Grand Champion’s Cup, again.  She waited in trepidation while Serge directed his assistants, then the Chief Steward turned toward her, expressionless, and whispered the words she had most dreaded.

In the Stewards’ room, Jimmy picked up the last recipe he had to review – the recipe for Mantecados, the first-place finisher in the International category, and the Best-of-Show winner.  He read through it quickly, paused, then slowly read it again, his mouth open and his face drained of color.

“My God,” he said out loud, “I’ve got to tell her.  No, I’ve got to tell the boss, and Serge has got to tell her.  It’s not against the rules, but…”

Mabel went through every category, by number, except for the categories of the top three cookies.  The Judge Coordinator stood beside her, handing out the ribbons to each third, second, and first place winner as they came up to the front.  Every winner received a good amount of applause, some more than others.  The winners who were not present were applauded, too.

Serge waited in the wings, watching from the side door.  By tradition, the Grand Champion’s Cup was hidden until the last minute.  No one was supposed to know until it was announced.

Will and Margaret and Bud and Linda were sitting together, having a drink and munching hors d’oeuvres while the winners were announced.  Since it would have been a million to one that someone else had entered Mantecados, they were certain that Will was going to win it all, but they had to sit and go through the whole thing.  Both Will and Bud made several trips up to the awards table.  Will had won three firsts, three seconds, and two thirds, and Bud had two firsts, three seconds, and one third, so their table was piled with ribbons before the top three were reached.

At last, the top three.  A woman from Vermont took home the third place in BOS, with the beautiful Decorated Cookie, then Bud DeCorreau took the second with his specialty Chocolate Chip Cookie.  He was well-liked, and got a big round of applause.

When Will’s name was announced as winner of the International category, and Best-of-Show, everybody knew what was coming next.  As Will stood by the podium with his blue ribbon and the big gold BOS ribbon, Mabel, doing her best to grin and bear it, beckoned to Serge Toussaint, standing in the doorway.

Jimmy, Serge’s assistant, rushed out of the Stewards’ room, holding the recipe, and into the corridor, only to see Serge disappear into the dining room with the Grand Champion’s Cup.  He reached the doorway as Serge reached the podium, and watched and listened as Will Stannard was crowned Grand Champion for the record-breaking fourth time, and the tight-lipped Mabel Grover silently shook hands with the Champion while the whole room applauded.

It was a great moment, and Will stood there for several minutes before slowly making his way back to the table, stopping every few feet for handshakes, hugs, and words of congratulation.  By the time he reached his own table, Mabel Grover had signaled to the hotel’s Catering Manager to send the servers in with dinner right away, hoping to squelch the celebration with food.

Serge had seen Jimmy beckoning to him from the doorway, and he walked over as soon as Will started back towards his table.  He stepped into the corridor, where the light was better, and proceeded to read the recipe that Jimmy handed him.  When he reached the offending ingredient, he stopped reading and a smile slowly grew bigger on his face.  He glanced over at the head table, where Larry Grover was trying to get his wife to sit down.  It was obvious that she was seething with rage.

Jimmy didn’t know what to think.  Was this funny?  His boss simply thanked him and said, “I’ll take care of it.”

A few minutes later, Serge was looking on in horror as Emma Cookson - Baker and Larry Grover tried in vain to prevent Mabel from picking up a steak knife and driving it into Will’s chest.  All it had taken to push her over the edge was for Serge Toussaint to tell her, the most outspoken vegetarian on the cookie circuit, that she had awarded the top prize of the year to a cookie baked with lard.

The End