Church still prepping for Cookie Walk
WOONSOCKET — Dorothy Karolyshyn rolls out a slab of dough in the parish hall kitchen at St. Michael Ukrainian Orthodox Church where a handful of apron-clad parishioners are standing around a massive marble top table practicing the art of cookie making.
Satisfied that the dough has been rolled out to the right thickness, Karolyshyn uses a cookie cutter to make an Easter egg-shaped cookie with perfectly sharp and defined edges. She places the raw dough cookie on a baking sheet with a handful of others just like it and slides it gently onto a rack in the kitchen’s stainless steel convection oven.
What emerges six to eight minutes later is a perfectly baked sugar cookie, one of the more than 50 varieties of scrumptious cookies to be featured at the church’s third annual Spring Cookie Walk on
Saturday, March 31.
So, what’s a cookie walk? It’s a large assortment of homemade cookies that prospective buyers browse, walking down long tables stacked high with mountains of cookies.
St. Michael Ukrainian Orthodox Church’s cookie walks, sponsored by the parish’s Senior Ukrainian Orthodox League twice a year at Christmas and Easter, are legendary, drawing homemade cookie lovers from throughout Rhode Island to the church’s parish hall at 74 Harris Ave.
At the cookie walk on March 31, there will be 15 stations with three eightfoot tables piled high with more than 50 varieties of cookies and other baked goods for the Easter table, including artisan breads filled with apricot, poppy seed, prune, cherry and farmers cheese; homemade khrustyky, a Ukrainian dainty pastry; pyrohy, a cheese-and-potato dumpling; and colorful pysanky, Ukrainian Easter eggs decorated in an ancient tradition.
This year, Orthodox Easter is on April 8, while the Western church celebrates Easter on April 1.
When buying the cookies, customers are given a box and then walk through the stations to pick out the cookies they want. There are literally thousands of homemade cookies available, from classic cutouts to ethnic favorites, all of them baked by an army of parishioners and volunteers.
After you fill your box, it’s weighed at the checkout table. Cookies are $9.50 per pound, while other items are priced accordingly.
“We regularly sell out in a few hours, and there is usually a line of people waiting for the doors to open,” says parishioner Christine Charest, who has helped coordinate the Christmas cookie walk since its inception 13 years ago (the Spring Cookie Walk has been held for the past three years).
What’s unique about the cookie walks is they offer the chance to customize a selection of holiday cookies. And it’s all for a good cause because they help raise funds for the church.
To prepare for the upcoming Spring Cookie Walk, about 30 church bakers have been busy at home and in the parish hall kitchen for the better part of two months rolling, cutting and baking cookies. On Friday morning, Charest, Karolyshyn and fellow parishioners Donna Eichorn and Eleanor Kogut were in the church kitchen baking dozens of sugar cookies and butterhorns, a flaky sour cream pastry dough rolled up with cinnamon sugar and walnuts.
It’s a lot of work, especially for the Christmas cookie walk, which is the bigger of the two cookie walk events. The Spring Cookie Walk was started in 2015 to help raise money for last year’s 70th annual Ukrainian Orthodox League annual conference, which was hosted by St. Michael Ukrainian Orthodox Church.
Charest, a lifelong parishioner of St Michael’s, said the church decided to keep the spring cookie walk as an annual fundraising tradition around Easter time. Proceeds from this year’s event on March 31 will help pay for a much-needed second freezer for the parish hall kitchen.
That kitchen will get a big workout on Friday, March 23, when the church’ holds its other popular fundraiser, St. Michael’s Ukrainian Lenten Kitchen. Back from a small hiatus, the kitchen will return for one Friday only (March 23) from 3 to 6 p.m. and feature all traditional Ukrainian foods, including Vareneky (pierogies) filled with potato and cheese or cabbage; stuffed cabbage filled with meats and rice; borscht; cabbage soup; and pyrohy filled with potato and cheese. There will also be plenty of desserts, including prune rolls, cheese cake or vegan chocolate cake.
You can eat there restaurant-style or do take out. Frozen foods will also be available. No phone orders will be accepted. Cash, checks and credit/debit cards will be accepted.
The church will also hold its annual Spring Flea Market May 5 from 8 a.m. to noon at the parish hall where new and gently used jewelry, furniture, glassware, and household items will be for sale in addition to many other treasures.
Also, the church’s annual pig roast will be held May 19 from 8 p.m. to noon at the Pavilion at the Circle Laurier Club, 165 East School St., Woonsocket.
The pig will be on display all day, roasting at the pavilion. The event is being held from 5 to 9 p.m. with dinner served at 6 p.m. and live music from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. Dave Mallari from The Pig Kahuna (and Woonsocket roots) will be roasting the pig and preparing all the fixins.’
Tickets are $35 per person. There will be a cash bar, a raffle to choose who will make the first “cut” of the pig, and a liquor basket raffle.
This event will benefit St. Michael’s, which is still working on repairs to the church from the fire in 2012.
To reserve tickets, call Christine at 401-765-1410 or Eleanor at 508-8837176.
One would think that baking thousands of cookies might sound like grueling work, but for Charest, Karolyshyn, Elchorn and Kogut, it’s also a lot of fun.
“We enjoy each others company,” says Elchorn. “We like to get creative and bounce ideas off of each other.”