When Roxana Chiu was a kid growing up in Wellesley, Massachusetts, she never turned down a trip to run errands with her mother. To be fair, it wasn’t exactly a choice, because when you’re five there is no other option except to tag along, but she did so willingly, and she looked forward to it.

“When my mom would take my sister and I along to do errands, she always gave us these rainbow cookies,” Chiu, now thirty-two and living in Boston, said one recent afternoon of the Italian bakery staple. “I have no idea where she would purchase the cookies, but she always gave them to us,” she remembered.

This was Chiu’s earliest food memory. “They are actually more like little cakes,” she says of her favorite cookie. “And the good ones are hard to find.”

Chiu is not a chef. She and her sister, Bettina Janco, are the founders of SnapSuites, a luxury membership-based office space located in Boston’s Back Bay. But as a hobby, and as what she calls her therapeutic creative outlet, Chiu bakes.

“Food is the best way to explore culture, and I am a foodie at heart. In 2013, when we founded SnapSuites, that’s when I really started baking, and I baked all types of traditional cookies and cakes and cobblers, and everyone really liked them.” When she gave her favorite cookie a shot, the response from her family and friends was unmitigated.

In 2018 Chiu’s parents purchased the Harbor View Hotel in Edgartown. She set up a meeting with the newly hired executive chef, Patrice Martineau, who is at the helm of both restaurants inside the hotel, aptly named Roxana Bar and Bettini Restaurant. If he liked the cookies, Chiu was going to offer him her recipe. “He took one bite and yelled, ‘Sold!’”

Roxy’s Rainbow Cookies are rich and sweet, with a dense cake-cookie texture. The base of the cookie is a thin red almond cake topped with an even thinner layer of raspberry jam, which is also delicately spread between two more thin layers of almond cake, one white and one green. On top of it all is a layer of chocolate. The cookies pair well with an ice-cold glass of chilled milk or a full-bodied Cabernet.

All guests who check into the Harbor View Hotel are given these sweet squares, and both Roxana Bar and Bettini Restaurant have Roxy’s Rainbow Cookies listed on their dessert menus. But you don’t have to stay the night or enjoy a whole meal to try these Island-famous treats – they can be ordered solo any time at Roxana Bar, just in case you need a quick break or a pick-me-up from running errands in downtown Edgartown.