Obama Chic: The Chocolate Chunk Cookie Sensation

What happens when you mix chocolate chunk deliciousness with a bit of prime real estate next door to President-elect Barack Obama's former campaign headquarters in Iowa?

Your cookie goes from being a ho-hum addition to your diner menu to an overnight global sensation that is being considered as a featured Inaugural Day sweet.

The chocolate chunk cookie from Baby Boomers Cafe in Des Moines, Iowa, may be the most coveted cookie since Mrs. Fields first took hers to a national audience -- and all because the president-elect's daughters, Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7, took a liking to them when they visited the campaign headquarters in Des Moines, Iowa, last year.

"Before the election the girls told Barack they wanted some cookies from us because they liked the cookies," Baby Boomers Cafe co-owner Rodney Maxfield told FOXNews.com. "The press got a hold of it. Somehow and then AP got a hold of it. It went national, and then it went global. We're selling a lot of cookies."

The Obama bump has brought on such brisk cookie sales that the small diner in Des Moines has had to re-think its entire business.

Maxfield and his business partner Tom Magnani have seen sales skyrocket and even had to spin off the cookie business to handle the volume of orders they were getting from both in-store sales and orders through a Baby Boomers Cookie Web site set up a few weeks ago.

They went from selling less than 300 cookies each week -- sometimes giving away leftovers on Friday afternoons -- to selling thousands of cookies in one day.

Baby Boomers sold about 18,000 Christmas week. On Jan. 2, Baby Boomers had 89 dozen local orders, excluding Web orders and walk-ins. "I bet we'll probably sell 3,000 cookies today," Maxfield said.

"We're known as the cookie guys now and everybody wants to come in," he said. "We're the hot destination spot in Iowa now and everybody wants pictures of us and autographs and pictures of the cookies and us with the cookies."

Michael Wolnerman, a friend of Maxfield and Magnani, has gone in on the cookie business with the men since they spun it off into its own entity a few weeks ago, and the fledgling business has hired a publicist and an accountant.

The cookies sell for $9 a dozen in the diner and for $11 a dozen, plus shipping, online.

"It happened so fast and furious that we're really trying to get a handle on our ingredient cost," said Wolnerman, who is also a pharmacist and commercial real estate developer.

He said the Obamas ate at Baby Boomers Cafe frequently while on the campaign trail.

"It wasn't unusual to see them on a regular basis and rub elbows with them, literally, because the restaurant is so small," Wolnerman said. "The next thing you know people are asking more and more questions, and it took off."

To help deal with the increased cookie demand, Baby Boomers has teamed up with a local bakery to make their cookies after the diner closes at 2 p.m.

"When we leave here, we go there and bake a couple thousand cookies," Maxfield said. "Now we have it down to a science. It takes us like two hours to make about 1,500 cookies."

For now, Maxfield said the cookie business is a fun addition to life at the diner, but with its enormous popularity, juggling both may become more difficult.

"Now it's a totally different company," Maxfield said. "Right now it's manageable. There are times that it's not. Who knows what's going to happen around the inauguration and what we're going to do."

Baby Boomers Cookies chocolate chunk cookies have been chosen to be sold as elite cookies for corporate jets.

A spokeswoman for Obama's Inaugural Committee Office told FOXNews.com on Friday that so far, the cookies have not shown up on the menu at the president-elect's Inauguration Day events, although they were pitched to Oprah Winfrey's company as a possible menu item at her inaugural festivities in Washington later this month.

"That would be the golden ticket," Maxfield said. "This cookie was just my great-grandma's cookie."

So what makes his cookies so good?

Maxfield said it's a secret ingredient -- something they use at the diner that he won't reveal, but it makes them so very delicious.

"They're really moist and soft, and they're good dunking cookies," he said. "They make you feel like a kid. It's like when you have a snow day and you stay in your pajamas and watch TV all day. You have two and then you decide to have four. It's a good cookie."

While they're selling by the thousand, Maxfield said they still give them away at the diner, on occasion. "We have to keep it real. People think we're these famous cookie-making guys now, and its like, maybe we are, but still. The cookie means more."