Down in Deerfield Beach:

Creating a cookie for a saint is not as far-fetched as it may seem. For baker Joseph Teresi and his customer Giacomo Piraino, it was a happy convergence of cuisine and faith.

It is significant that they met on St. Joseph’s Day, March 19. Piraino dropped into Teresi’s bakery, Joseph’s Italian Pastry Shop in Deerfield Beach, to pick up a special cream-filled pastry that Teresi produces each year to honor St. Joseph, or San Giuseppe.

Spotting the picture of Padre Pio on the wall of the bakery, Piraino began chatting with Teresi about the saint, who bled from wounds in the same places as Christ.

In no time, they came up with the joint inspiration to create a cookie for Padre Pio.

Teresi ordered special cookie cutters and concocted a thick, crumbly lemon-honey butter cookie in the shape of – and almost as big as – a man’s hand. In the cookie’s palm, he added a dab of raspberry jam to signify the blood that issued from Padre Pio’s hands most of his life.

Today – the 120th anniversary of the saint’s birth – Teresi and his brother Walter will be busy inside the shop selling Padre Pio cookies, along with their regular delicacies – a dizzying array of heavenly wheat cakes, cannolis, biscotti and picture-perfect pastries.

Outside, Piraino will be displaying his collection of Padre Pio relics for anyone who is sick or in need of saintly intervention.

"When they come out we’ll put the relics on the box of pastries and on them. We’ll pray over each one of the people," said Piraino "It’s not so much the cookie. The most important thing is to touch people with the relics."

Piraino has been known to sit for hours to accommodate people who queued up for the relics.