A Renaissance for the Italian Rainbow Cookie

An Artist’s Debut Furniture Collection Comes With Sculpted Hands and Eyeballs

After working for three decades with gold and oxidized silver, the Brooklyn-based artist and jewelry maker Darcy Miro experienced a revelation with a fistful of clay during a visit to a Fort Greene ceramics studio in 2019. “So many years of burning myself and getting metal shards stuck in my feet and my hands — and then I felt the clay,” she says. “The sensuality was unparalleled.” Miro, 49, bought her own kiln shortly after and started making small ceramic pieces, then moved on to bigger and bigger ones. The result is an exuberant debut collection of furniture that includes a desk bearing a sculpted hand; a sofa covered with polka-dot ring- and pretzel-shaped pottery and upholstered in ethically sourced alpaca fur; and a coral-inspired vase with protruding eyeballs. While she’s no longer solely focused on producing metal cuffs and rings, Miro wants her furniture to feel every bit as precious as her jewelry. “If you can have one thing and you love art,” she says, “well, maybe that thing is also a desk. So now you have art and a desk.” — Gillian Brassil

The Rainbow Cookie’s Golden Era

The beloved Italian rainbow cookie isn’t actually a cookie at all but rather moist layers of almond cake separated by smears of fruit jam and covered in a thin veneer of chocolate. It doesn’t even look like a rainbow, hewing more closely to the red, white and green bands of the Italian flag. Also, it’s more likely to appear on a Jewish deli’s menu than a pizzeria’s. Yet the cookies are a New York classic and an object of deep nostalgia, which might explain their recent revival among pastry chefs and cooks. “Everyone fought over the rainbow cookies because they’re the best ones,” says Doron Petersan, who sells a dairy- and egg-free version at Sticky Fingers diner and Sticky Fingers Sweets & Eats bakery, the vegan establishments she owns in Washington, D.C. At Ggiata Delicatessen, a Los Angeles sandwich shop opened by three friends who missed the New Jersey delis of their youth, the cookies — made with tart raspberry jam — are a staple of their otherwise rotating selection of baked goods. “I didn’t really like rainbow cookies before I started making them,” says Georgia Wodder, the pastry chef at Mel’s, a wood-fired pizza spot in Manhattan, where she serves wafer-thin pieces atop a stracciatella gelato sundae. “But they’re a real crowd-pleaser.” — Amiel Stanek

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