A package of light brown cookies covered in sesame seeds sits on Vincent Palozzi’s desk, and his mother Josephine’s face is printed on the plastic label. Palozzi remembers baking with his mother during the holidays. She would start at 9 or 10 p.m. and bake until 3 or 4 in the morning so he and his siblings would wake up to a plate of fresh cookies. He learned a lot during those baking sessions.

“That’s why I can do what I can do today,” said Palozzi. “I paid a lot of attention to what she was doing.” Palozzi, a linguistics lecturer at Miami, turned those childhood lessons from the kitchen into a business. Baking out of his own home, he shares his mother’s passion for Italian cookies with the community.