The vibrant pastries you’ll find in Baton Rouge’s Latin grocery stores

At local Latin markets, customers come for those hard-to-find, specialty ingredients: Mexican seasonings and sodas, a large range of dried chiles, prickly pears, giant banana leaves. Over in the markets’ taquerias, diners devour flavor-packed carnitas tacos, flautas and stews.

But in the bakery aisles, the colorful choices become almost overwhelming with floor-to-ceiling glass cases stocked with breads, doughnuts and cookies.

Galleta cookies as big as your head seem to smile up at you. Literally—some of the cookies are marked by a smiley face drawn in dark red jam. A few trays over, rosy pink, crumbly shortbread cookies known as polvorones are dusted with sugar. Quesadilla pound cakes are laced with creamy cheese and sesame seeds. Red jam oozes out of Bolas de Berlim doughnuts. Airy loaves of concha sweet bread are topped with sugar swirled to look like a seashell. Cinnamon-spiced puerquito cookies, with a flavor similar to ginger, are shaped like pigs.

Plastic bags and stainless steel tongs nearby are available so customers can help themselves. Each item costs less than a dollar, and the entire stash we picked up for this shoot rang in at less than $10.

The labels are all in Spanish, and many items don’t have a label at all. So for those unfamiliar with Latin baking, the decision making will depend on what looks most pleasing to the eye, adventurous guesswork or chatting with the store clerks.

But if you ask us, that’s the fun of shopping here.

This article was originally published in the January 2019 issue of 225 Magazine.