WHEN IT SEEMED like the whole world was babying sourdough starters in 2020, Louisa Hays Tremonte was working to summit a different baking peak: the Italian rainbow cookie. A staple of Italian American bakeries across the East Coast and Midwest, the colorful stacked wonder takes three layers of almond-scented cake in red, white and green (yes, the colors of the Italian flag) and sandwiches them with thin layers of apricot jam before enrobing the entire thing in chocolate. The cookies are sliced into neat little squares with their tricolor centers on display.

“I became obsessed with the rainbow cookie,” Tremonte says. Tremonte is a born-and-raised Seattleite. She didn’t grow up with rainbow cookies, but after years of eating them — not only while visiting her sister in New York but also on trips to visit her Italian American husband’s family in Chicago — and finding mixed results when it came to flavor, she wanted to perfect her own.