Day of the Dead: Pan de Muerto

A couple of Mexican friends of mine, Juan and Yeri, invited me to 'help' them make Pan de Muerto today, to celebrate the Dias des los Muertos. According to their recipe, this traditional bread is a sweet, slightly eggy yeast bread flavored with orange juice and orange flower water. The top of the bread is decorated with balls and a cross of lines of dough in imitation of a skull and crossbones. It's a type of bread that Mexican families place on temporary altars to be shared with the spirits of the ancestors.

Rather being an occasion of fright, this festival celebrates memories of those who have passed away and even involves making jokes and holding 'roasts' of people, teasing them about the vices that will eventually lead to their demise. Instead of trick-or-treating for candy, Mexican children ask for money from parents and relatives in order to buy a sugar skull that has their name written on it, which they consume at the end of the festival. Families get together and celebrate their loved ones, even with mariachis in the cemetery!

Anyway, in Mexico my friends always bought their pan de muerto at a store, so we weren't quite sure about the recipe and the desired texture of the dough during the process. Between the three of us, we managed to make a tasty bread and have fun doing it, even though it didn't manage to replicate the traditional bread we were trying to make. It didn't rise nearly enough, but topped with enough melted butter and sugar, we couldn't go too far wrong, and frankly I thought it was delicious. Yeri made a fantastic hot chocolate using traditional Mexican spiced chocolate tablets, brought from her hometown of Oaxaca, and Juan missed the fact that a less dense bread would have acted more like a sponge for dipping in the chocolate. What's the word in Spanish for gourmandise?

 

Hanging out by the oven and sipping hot chocolate was a perfect way to spend this Toussaint holiday, which seems to have thrown Paris headlong into the oncoming winter with blustery winds and chilly fingers, despite the sunny blue skies.