Los Frailes Campechanos

These are from Campeche. Not Yucatán, not Quintana Roo, Campeche. The walled port city on the Gulf where Spanish galleons unloaded sugar and almonds and Manila silks for two hundred years, and where the convents that lined the old streets perfected a baroque pastry tradition that the rest of Mexico still has not caught up to.

The fraile is named for a friar. The shape is meant to echo a tonsured head: round, crowned, slightly comic in its formality. The fritter underneath is a lard-rich dough cut with sherry, fried until it is the color of old gold. The cocada that mounds on top is made from fresh grated coconut, not the bagged shredded stuff from the baking aisle. Campeche is a coconut port. The cocada uses what came off the boats and what still grows on the trees lining the malecón.

The rose-tinted meringue is the signature. Italian meringue, cooked with a hot sugar syrup so it holds for hours without weeping, tinted the pale pink of the convent walls in late afternoon light. The silver dragees on top are a holdover from when convents decorated their dulces for saints' days and the bishop's visits.

This is not a casual dessert. It takes an afternoon. It uses lard, fresh coconut, sherry, and a candy thermometer. If that sounds like too much, this is not your dish yet. La cocina no es decoración, es trabajo, especialmente en los dulces de convento.