There’s no aroma like pan de muerto baking in your kitchen: butter, sugar, and orange zest filling the air. Every October, panaderías across Mexico fill their shelves with this bread, but none of them can compete with the warmth of making it at home. It’s a project, yes, but a joyful one. The dough is rich and buttery, perfumed with orange, and finished in three ways: classic sugar, floral marigold sugar, and dramatic corn ash (ceniza) sugar. The result is a bread that feels sacred, seasonal, and deeply Mexican—an offering as beautiful as it is delicious.
