A New Pope? Time to Make Cookies at This Queens Bakery.

Good morning. It’s Monday. Today we’ll meet a bakery owner who has put pictures of Pope Leo XIV on cookies. We’ll also get details on a warning from Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy about possible air travel delays as summer vacation season approaches.

Credit…James Barron/The New York Times

Like everyone else, Maria Notaro had to wait. She had to wait for the white smoke. She had to wait for the announcement. Only then could she get to work.

She downloaded a photo of Pope Leo XIV waving from the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, where he had just been presented to the world. She ran it through a machine that transfers images onto icing for cakes and cookies. Then she and the bakers at her pastry shop in Queens put the first batch of portraits on top of squarish shortbread cookies.

Just like that, the edible pope.

The elevation last week of Leo, who was born Robert Francis Prevost and grew up in Chicago, has inspired merchandise makers across the U.S. A restaurant chain in the new pope’s hometown has added a sandwich named for him to its menu, and a bakery in Milwaukee has created cookies with a statuette — a figure holding an American flag, with a miter above its head. The National Bobblehead Hall of Fame Museum, also in Milwaukee, is selling dolls of Francis and Leo in white robes.

Leo is not the first pope to get the cookie treatment from Notaro, whose bakery, La Guli, has been in the same place in Astoria for 88 years, a few doors from the church she attends. She made cookies with an image of Pope Francis when he visited New York almost a decade ago. She said she considered Francis “special,” a pope who looked out for marginalized people.

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