c. 2008 Religion News Service

CLEVELAND _ 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 a senior citizens center in Garfield Heights, Ohio, are using cookie sales to feed more than holiday revelers. They’re fattening their nonprofit’s endowment as they strive to continue delivering services to senior citizens living in apartments, a nursing home, assisted living facility 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,” says Sister Mary Assumpta as she transfers 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, baseball-loving Assumpta might be best known locally after her cameo in the movie “Major League” and her penchant for baking chocolate chip cookies for the Cleveland Indians beginning in the dark days of the 1980s.

In 2001, she decided to bake cookies for donors to the senior’s center. 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 200 pounds of chocolate chip cookies, or about 400 dozen, in the first year.

The oven’s pilot light was 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 citizen 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 two 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 across the local diocese.

“We may have to put on a night shift,” says Assumpta. Already they’ve ramped up from cooking three days a week to five.

Five nuns have joined the convent _ where the TV either plays 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 Assumpta in a tizzy: “Her family runs restaurants and she has a degree in marketing!”

On cookie days, after prayer and breakfast, the sisters bake, preparing the dough on stainless-steel counters. With the boombox blaring secular Christmas tunes, Assumpta cranks the cookie depositor while Sister Rita Marie sprays the cookie sheets with Pam cooking spray and Sister Margaret Mary dunks dough balls in cinnamon sugar.

Sister Catherine Grace _ the tall one _ handles the baking because the top rack of the oven is so high. “People were burning themselves trying to reach,” she explains.

Residents like 81-year-old Frances Marunowski and Dorothy Vuk, 86, form the dough into perfect chestnut-sized balls as Assumpta changes the lyrics of the current song, singing: “It’s beginning to smell a lot like cookies.”

Hands move methodically and quickly, but sometimes not fast enough: “Sister really pushes us since she got that machine,” says Marunowski.

Assumpta removes her apron and sneaks to the breakfast nook for a cup of coffee as the rollers and the bakers catch up.

She talks about what a blessing it is that the nuns have not grown weary of the baking and how customers get so much more than tasty treats when they order from Nun Better.

“We pray,” she says, “for everyone who buys.”

(Michael K. McIntyre writes for The Cleveland Plain Dealer in Cleveland.)

KRE/AMB/DEA END MCINTYREA photo of nuns baking cookies is available via https://religionnews.com