Sweet charity: Nuns’ cookies help fund services for seniors

December 14, 2008 at 12:00a.m.

CLEVELAND (AP) — The kitchen inside the convent of the Sisters of the Holy Spirit smells like heaven coated in cinnamon sugar.

The nuns are busy this time of year, with the help of a few spry seniors, producing miracles at the rate of 48 to a sheet, 10 racks at a time. With prayer, practiced hands and pounds and pounds of butter, their work yields a bounty that could strengthen their ministry to the elderly for years to come.

Behold, a snickerdoodle is born.

The sisters, whose order sponsors and supports the Jennings Center for Older Adults in Garfield Heights, are using cookie sales to feed more than holiday revelers. They’re fattening the nonprofit’s endowment as they strive to continue delivering services to senior citizens on the sprawling campus of senior citizens apartments, a nursing home, assisted living and adult day care.

Most of the residents are on Medicaid, and it doesn’t cover the tab.

“We want to get to the point where we wouldn’t have to rely on donations,” Sister Mary Assumpta said as she transferred a glob of dough that could fill a Sunday collection basket from a 60-quart industrial mixer — she calls it Big Daddy — to a hand-cranked cookie depositor she had to buy to speed up the assembly line.

“Eventually, we’ll outgrow our kitchen and our capabilities. As our cookies become more nationally known, we’ll have to go commercial. But we’ll always have some production here,” she says.

The habit-wearing, Indians-loving Sister Assumpta might be the best-known nun in Cleveland after her cameo in the movie “Major League” and her penchant for baking chocolate chip cookies for the team beginning in the dark days of the 1980s.

In 2001, she decided to bake cookies for the Jennings Center’s donors. They loved them so much, she started a small business in the convent the following year and came up with the perfect name for the cookies: Nun Better. The nuns — working out of a basement kitchen — sold about 400 dozen chocolate chip cookies in the first year.

The oven’s pilot light was Sister Assumpta’s burning bush: Rolling dough could soon have the nonprofit’s endowment rolling in dough. So she ramped up production in a larger kitchen in the new motherhouse that opened in 2005, got some of the residents of the senior citizens apartments involved and worked a deal with Cleveland-based Monastery Greetings — purveyor of goods made by religious orders — for catalog and online sales, including aprons, coffee cups and a cookie jar that looks like a nun.

Now, the convent has a restaurant-quality, walk-in refrigerator and freezer, two five-rack ovens capable of holding sheets 2 feet long and, of course, Big Daddy. Last year, the nuns produced 3,400 pounds of cookies — 6,800 dozen in nine varieties, at $10 a pound. This year, it’ll be more than 4,000 pounds, with orders next week alone topping 500 pounds and a notice going out in Catholic church bulletins in the diocese Sunday.

“We may have to put on a night shift,” said Sister Assumpta.

Five nuns have joined the convent — where the TV plays either baseball or the Food Network — in the last five years, no doubt lured by the smell of fresh-baked cookies. That makes 11 in the convent and one living in the nursing home. And another young woman is contemplating the vocation, which has Sister Assumpta in a tizzy: “Her family runs restaurants and she has a degree in marketing!”