Smuggling Blueberry Kringle

My mother was born in Denmark and grew up in Racine, Wisconsin, which is home to a number of families of Danish heritage.  One of the defining tastes of my youth was Danish kringle.  Every time we visited my grandparents, there would be a kringle waiting for us and a few more purchased while we were in town.

Recently, I was back in Wisconsin for the funeral of my grandmother (and they did have kringle at the funeral home).  It was a good opportunity to be with my family and to remember all the the good times that we had together in my grandparents' little house.  

It was also a good opportunity to remember my Midwestern roots.  I shared with my congregation how different the sense of being Lutheran is in Racine and on Cape Cod.  Racine, with a population of around 80000 has 14 Evangelical Lutheran Church in America congregations, 10 Missouri synod Lutheran congregations and 3 Wisconsin synod congregations.  I'm sure there are also a few independent Lutheran churches but they are harder to research.  In Racine they might not ask "Are you Lutheran?" but "What sort of Lutheran are you?"  Cape Cod, with a population of slightly over 200000 has a grand total of 4 Lutheran congregations.  No matter how I drive, it takes me at least 40 minutes to get to the next closest Lutheran church on the Cape.  It made me realize that on the Cape, we need to do a more intentional job of defining ourselves because we are not a major player in the religious culture.

In any case, partly out of nostalgia for those Midwestern roots, partly out of a desire to share my experience with my children and partly because I really like kringle, I decided to take one on the plane with me.  My parents were kind enough to stop at a bakery on the way to the airport (They also bought a kringle, so the detour was not in vain for them).  I was dropped of at the Milwaukee airport with my check-in bag, my laptop bag and a blueberry kringle.

I toyed with idea of stowing it in my suitcase because a kringle would be fairly awkward to carry around an airport not to mention on two plane flights, but I had visions of trying to convince my children that well-traveled, smashed pastry is just as good as the regular stuff.  However, I discovered that the pastry was just about as large as my laptop.  The kringle traveled in the protected area usually reserved for a computer.  The computer traveled unprotected.  Everything made it back to Massachusetts with just a small amount of frosting loss.

I could have gotten home and ordered a kringle online and I will probably do so sometime this year.  They ship them in sturdy containers that seem to travel well.  But there was something about taking that piece of Wisconsin with me, protecting it from the press of crowds at O'Hare, carefully sliding it under a seat during the plane ride, and offering it to my family when I returned home that briefly connected those Midwestern roots to a Cape Cod life, offering a piece of my childhood to my own children.  It was worth the effort.