Día de los Muertos is my favorite holiday in Mexico City. I love the orange cempasúchitl flowers that suddenly pop up in the street medians and parks, and the altars sprinkled with flower petals and candles. I love watching the seasonal fall foods finally arrive in the markets: pan de muerto, calabaza en tacha, tejocotes.
Sadly, the Día de los Muertos season pretty much passed me by this year. I was traveling in the States through most of October, and then I got home and promptly caught a head cold. I was too sick to visit the Sugar Skull Market in Toluca like I did last year, or wander around checking out ofrendas.
One thing I could do, though, was make my own pan de muerto. Last year I took a class on how to make the round, orange-flavored loaves, so I was already familiar with what the dough contained — basically flour and a lot of butter — and how to form the ropes on top to make “bones.” The bread has a delicate orange taste, which comes from a few spoonfuls of orange blossom water, known in Spanish as agua de azahar.
I wanted to use Fany Gerson’s Pan de Muerto recipe from My Sweet Mexico. But I had to tweak a few things, because I was too tired and/or I didn’t have enough time to seek out the proper ingredients. Watered-down orange blossom essence became my substitute for agua de azahar, because it was all I could find. I dipped into my abundance of mascabado — unrefined cane sugar — and used that instead of regular white sugar, even though it made the dough less sweet.
Once I started baking, more issues popped up. My yeast starter, made from instant yeast and not active-dry as the recipe had stated, didn’t bubble, sending me into a panic. I couldn’t tell if my dough was too sticky, or not sticky enough. The dough also rose sloooowly: three hours during the first rising, and a whopping five after the dough chilled in the fridge overnight. (Note to Future Lesley: Do not place buttery dough in an heated oven to speed things up, as it’ll turn it into a greasy, sloppy mess.)
While my loaves baked, I discovered my oven temperature was whacked-out. My first batch looked pretty and golden-brown. When I sliced into it, the insides were still doughy and chewy.
So yeah. What I’m trying to say here is that both of my pan de muertos turned out kind of flat and homely.
I didn’t care too much in the end. The bread was the centerpiece of my Día de los Muertos celebration this year, and I was going to enjoy it. I sprinkled one loaf with sugar and the other without, as an experiment. I actually liked the un-sugared one better — it was lightly sweet and perfect with a cup of hot chocolate. Crayton and I each had a wedge for dessert on Nov. 1, while the candles burned on our altar. (Yes, that’s a bottle of Coke below. It’s for Crayton’s relatives in South Carolina.)
Here are the shots of my flattish, but still tasty, breads.
For more pan de muerto adventures, check out Three Clever Sisters (she also used Fany’s recipe, resulting in these cute, plump little loaves) and Steven McCutcheon-Rubio’s post on Serious Eats. If you made pan de muerto this year, send me a picture of it and I’ll post it here.
UPDATE: Here’s a picture of reader Isabel’s pan de muerto…
And Don Cuevas’s bread:
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