Traditional Day of the Dead candy

All the Day of the Dead festivities officially ended yesterday. Boo.

I did want to share with you, though: The Feria de Alfeñique had some of the neatest looking Day of the Dead candy, much of it from dulce de pepita, which is a thick, moldeable paste made from pumpkin seeds. It’s lightly sweet.

Almost everything was in miniature, which of course made the girlie side of me cry out. Especially when I saw the tiny pieces of sweet bread.

And then the teeny tortas. I bought one, just because they were so adorable. The man selling them joked, “Would you like one with ham or milanesa?”

There were also candy rats….

And hundreds of chocolates…

And tiny pieces of fruit, made from dulce de leche. (This is different from the dulce de leche in Argentina — it’s sweeter, and doesn’t have that warm caramel taste.) I liked dulce de pepita better, because it wasn’t as sweet.

And that’s not even mentioning the sugary fruits and vegetables. They’re regular old pieces of fruit (or squashes, or sweet potatoes) that have been boiled down with sugar and slathered in honey. They’re eaten a piece at a time, so you can savor their extreme-sugar state.

My faves, for their pure unique value, were the shriveled carrots and the nopal.

Lastly, I saw chongos zamoranos, which I’d read about in a few cookbooks but never seen up-close. I pictured little knots of honeyed curds — not sure why. These looked kind of like fried pastry dough, and ended up tasting like thin, ultra-concentrated sheets of dulce de leche.

Basically, another big mouthful of pure sugar. The chongos were too sweet for me.

Looking at all these now, I wish I would have bought more dulce de pepita. It’s 8:24 a.m., and I could really use a teeny torta right now with my coffee.