The holidays are a busy time for all cookie artists (aka “cookie makers”), including Friday Harbor’s Gerryanne Bohn, who works as a special education middle school teacher by day and sugar cookie maker by night.
“I teach during the day, cook at home until 11pm, and force myself to go to bed at 11 because I need sleep to teach,” Bohn said.
Take a break from your busy schedule and watch yourself compete on an episode of Food Network’s “Christmas Cookie Challenge,” which premieres Sunday, Dec. 11 at 8 p.m., at Boyne’s Vintage Holiday Market in Friday Harbor On the second day of selling her No Drift Cookies Saturday, December 10th from 10am to 3pm at the Brickworks Events Centre.
The ingredients for her Food Network debut began a year ago, though she didn’t know it at the time. Back in Wisconsin, where she grew up, Bone watched the 2021 version of the “Christmas Cookie Challenge” with her mother-in-law, who asked, “Do you want to do this?”
“Impossible,” Bohn replied. “They don’t give the cookie makers enough time. The icing takes at least 12 hours to harden, so you’re using something wet to make the structure, and then you need multiple recipes, and now I only have one recipe. I’m a perfectionist , I just thought it would make me uncomfortable.”
A month later, a producer on the Food Network reached out to Bohn through her Instagram account full of cookie images, urging her to apply for the show. Born demurred, but her husband convinced her it was an opportunity she shouldn’t pass up. After an application and multiple interviews/auditions, she will be filming for three days in Knoxville, Tennessee in late March/early April 2022.
“And then I spent the next few months prepping, trying to figure out different recipes and practicing the structure, because usually the second round of a competition is always some type of structure,” Bohn said. “It’s like preparing for the unknown. Practice everything, you never know what you’re going to get.”
Born is a recent transplant to the Pacific Northwest. And she was new to cookie making too.
Born and her husband visited San Juan Island for the first time in October 2019. During a second visit in August 2020, Bohn floated the idea of moving to Friday Harbor from Columbus, Wisconsin, which they did in 2021 after Bohn found a job in the school district.
Bohn started making cookies after his first visit to Washington state in 2019. Always crafty, Bohn got cookie-making tips from friends and became enthralled by the “flood” of videos of people icing cookies.
“They’re really appealing, they look content, and they calm you down a bit,” Bohn says. “You might think it’s ASMR.”
After co-workers bought some of her cookies for Christmas 2019, Bohn decided to start her Drift-Free Cookie business, named after the Drift-Free area near Wisconsin where she grew up. She sells cookie orders through her website, driftlesscookies.com. (Driftless doesn’t have a physical storefront.)
“I kept thinking, if I was good at it, I could start a business and sell cookies,” Bohn said. “As a teacher, I like to look for any extra ways to make money. Having to pay for my vacation and other expenses.”
Her largest order to date was for 200 cookies for a wedding on San Juan Island.
In the “Christmas Cookie Challenge,” Bohn, 33, competed against four other cookie makers for the $10,000 grand prize.
“The craziest thing is walking into a kitchen that isn’t your own,” Bohn said of filming the Food Network show. “You can prepare and make cookies all you want in your own home. But when you go into a completely different environment and have different tools, it’s scary and immediately sets you back.”
Even something as simple as a sound mixer that operates a little differently can present challenges.
“With my stand mixer, the bowl would twist away right where they pop,” says Bohn. “I don’t know if they’re going to show it, but I had a lot of trouble jumping off the bowl from the stands. There was like five minutes of me trying to pull it off, and I’m pretty sure my camera crew was like, ‘She the hell What’s going on? I’m like, ‘I just need a man with muscles right now.’”
One thing is for sure, that moment will be the final cut.
