Cookies by the thousands.

• Author: Moore, Melissa
• Position: Includes related article on wedding cakes - Lora Mahaffey of Calliope Designs and Confections - Company Profile

People like Lora Mahaffey's cookies. That's why she's in business, making cookies and a bunch of other luscious goodies in a nondescript little house on the outskirts of Spenard.

For the past three years, Mahaffey has been baking cookies. But baking isn't all she does. She's quite a successful businesswoman, too. And hers is a perennial Alaska success story.

After high school, Mahaffey wandered around the British Isles for about 10 years, working such jobs as a mural painting and goat herding to pay for college. After earning her degree at England's Roehampton University in art history, manuscript translation and restoration, she decided she wanted to come to Alaska on vacation.

So, with $200 in her pocket, she headed for the Great North.

"In just a few days, I found a place to live, got a job and met my husband," she said. "And I never left."

After a while of working for someone else, Mahaffey decided she wanted to start her own business. So, with $3,000, a mixer and 70 cookie sheets, she opened up Calliope Designs and Confections in a 700-square-foot house across the street from Carrs Quality Center on Minnesota Drive. When baking anything, Mahaffey holds her standards high. Everything is made from scratch. And the recipes are her own.

She started with a contract for 3,000 cookies a month for Era Aviation Inc. Three years later, she and employee Will McDonald scoop up about 30,000 very tasty cookies every month. She even bakes enough cookies to feed the growing minds of Service High School.

But that's not all she does. Mahaffey bakes and designs exquisite wedding cakes, too. She described one cake she made for a wedding for 250 people held in rural Alaska. Complete with a fountain.

"I had try ship it in components," she said. "I glued everything down. It took eight boxes and five pages of instructions. But it looked really nice. That was one of the best, most difficult, cakes I've ever done."

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BY MELISSA MOORE

Being a reporter, I generally...