“If you love bread you’ll love Mexico,” said my boss at the Chilean restaurant in Vancouver who had lived in Mexico for seven years.

This isn’t exactly the case. I find it extremely difficult to actually find bread in Puebla, and have distressingly found myself eating Bimbo much of the time, but in one thing she was absolutely correct: the pastries are phenomenal. And I live a mere two blocks away from the best bakery I’ve yet to find in Puebla, the entertainingly named “La Verdad.”

Some of the Mexican pastries look vaguely familiar to a North American or European, and others look like they’re from Mars. The classic Mexican pastry is the concha, which is basically a bun decorated with swirls of vanilla or chocolate flavoured sugar, so that it looks like a shell. Another classic (and expensive by the bakery’s standards at 7 pesos) is something that more or less resemble a birdsnest cookie, but make entirely from peanut dough, known as Polvorón de Cacahuete.

There are delicious sugared rings of flakey pastry for those who like a bit of crunch, and soft pastries covered in chocolate or sugar for those who prefer cake. There’s even a happy medium: the flakey sugared ring with a mound of cake rising from the centre….

Best of all, for about a dollar, so people can stuff themselves into oblivion, to the point where it takes a week to work up another appetite for a Saturday-morning trip to La Verdad.