Chocolate chip cookies turn $20 into $500

WASILLA — When Mary Pfiffner set out to test the generosity of her community, she didn’t realize just how much her community would surprise her.

“All I did was make some cookies,” she said.

The whole story started when she signed up to help out at her church, Sacred Heart on Bogard Road.

Pfiffner said the first of six parishioners who signed up to help got a thank-you gift. Inside the envelopes were cash gifts and a note asking recipients to let Father Scott Garett know how they used the money. He said he gave away 21 envelopes with cash inside ranging from $20 to $100 and challenged parishioners to multiply the gift; like the parable of the talents in Matthew 25:14-30.

Pfiffner said she was surprised and a little embarrassed when she opened her envelope and saw the cash inside.

“There I am with $20 thinking, ‘no, the church isn’t supposed to give me money, I’m supposed to give it money,’” Pfiffner said.

But what could she do with it?

“I thought, ‘well $20 isn’t going to do a whole lot,’ so I went out and got a bunch of goodies for cookies,” she said.

She called them “thank you cookies” and baked up 100 of them, figuring she’d ask $1 apiece and donate that $100 to the Wasilla Food Pantry.

Even her grandson Braeden Keough helped with the effort by packaging the cooled cookies, Pfiffner said.

Turns out, her community was exactly five times as generous as she’d thought.

“We sold them at our church … and the $20 turned into $500,” she said.

Well, $535 to be exact. Clearly, people were paying well above the $1 she was asking for the chocolate chip treats.

“There was one lady that gave me $100 and she took one cookie!” she said.

Everyone knew exactly where the money was going.

“We just kept saying, ‘it’s for the people at the food pantry, it’s a really hard year this year they really need the money,’” she said.

The food pantry and the church have a longstanding relationship. A lot of parishioners volunteer there. Pfiffner said that another person who received cash as a thank-you gift used it to buy food to donate to the pantry.

The rest of the gifts were pretty much all put to charitable uses, too, Garett said.

Pfiffner said she’s only been a Valley resident for a couple of years. She moved here from Anchorage.

“I‘m so glad we’re out in the Valley now,” she said. “They really see that there is a need and they are willing to share.”

Contact reporter Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.