Bolitas de Queso Yucatecas

These are from Yucatán. Specifically from the panaderías of Mérida, where they line the glass cases beside the marquesotes and the polvorones, and where every family has a regular order for baptisms, weddings, kids' birthdays, the kinds of celebrations that fill a house with cousins.

Bolitas de queso are puff pastry. Real puff pastry, with butter folded into the dough four times so it bakes up in distinct golden layers. Most pan dulce in Mexico does not use this technique. The Yucatán peninsula does, and it is one of the small pieces of evidence that this state's pastry tradition came in by a different door than the rest of the country. Yucatán traded with Cuba, with New Orleans, with Europe by sea long before it traded easily by land with Ciudad de México. The pastries show it.

The filling is cream cheese, sugar, vanilla, and the zest of lima dulce yucateca, that perfumed sweet lime that grows in the peninsula and tastes like nothing else in Mexico. If you cannot find it, use the zest of any good lime, but understand you are losing something specific. The sugar coat on the outside is not optional. That snow of granulated sugar is what makes a bolita a bolita. Without it, you have a puff pastry filled with cheese. With it, you have what the panadero in Mérida hands across the counter wrapped in a paper bag that turns translucent from the butter on its way home.

My mother did not make these. She was jalisciense and she made jalisciense pan dulce. I learned bolitas from a woman named Doña Carmela in Valladolid, who let me sit in her kitchen at four in the morning for three days while she baked for a wedding of two hundred guests. She told me the dough does not forgive impatience and the oven does not forgive a cold morning. She was right about both. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.