I first learned what an alfajor (plural: alfajores) was when I was in college. One of my best friends had a friend whose family had lived in Peru (they immigrated twice: once from Japan to Peru, and then a second time from Peru to the U.S.), and during that time, they were introduced to these little sweet treats. My friend used to rave about her friend’s family’s homemade alfajores. And although I’d never tasted them, occasionally I would see them at Latin American bakeries here in New York, and I’d pick up one or two. I loved all the different textures and flavors in a single bite.

Alfajores are Spanish in origin, but they have taken on different iterations as they have traveled the globe. An alfajor comes in a number of different shapes and sizes, but in Latin America, you can expect it to consist of two round buttery cookies, usually made with butter, corn starch/nut/wheat flour, sandwiched between a thick layer of dulce de leche. If you are lucky, in some parts of Latin America, you can even find alfajores filled with cajeta, or goat’s milk caramel, instead of dulce de leche, which is technically sugar and cow’s milk caramel. They are also sometimes rolled on their sides in shredded coconut. They are buttery, flaky, crunchy, soft, sweet, and not too sweet all at the same time!

Almost everywhere we went in Montevideo and now Buenos Aires, we saw alfajores, mostly made with corn starch to be even more flaky and nutty. Most of the time, they were dusted in powdered sugar and sometimes rolled in shredded coconut. You can find them in bakeries made fresh, as well as at supermarkets and random little grocery shops pre-packaged individually. Argentina is particularly obsessed with alfajores, as they are known to be the world’s largest consumer of alfajores, consuming more than a billion alfajores per year. The food packaging, likely by law, is also very transparent and honest: they are high in both saturated fat (butter) and “excessive sugar.” So far, the best one that I’ve enjoyed on this trip has been at the Mercado Ferrando in Montevideo, at the bakery that is on your left when you walk in. They have several types of alfajores, including a chocolate and a chocolate-filled one, but I wanted the more classic variation and just got the alfajor de maicena (with corn flour). It was flaky, buttery, and not too sweet. I was obsessed and fought the urge to buy another one. I’ve had many cookies in my lifetime to date, but I will say that the decadence of a South American style alfajor really ranks up there when it comes to the meaning of “decadence” in a single bite of dessert.

Regarding dulce de leche — it is truly ubiquitous here, regardless of whether you are at a bakery, looking at a restaurant dessert menu, or at the supermarket. You cannot escape dulce de leche here! We found out that there are even dulce de leche taste contests across some South American countries, probably similar to the baguette contest in France. Though oddly enough, we’ve noticed that dulce de leche here actually isn’t as cloyingly sweet and rich as the ones we’ve eaten back home. Not sure if it’s just us, but it’s something we both concluded, after having quite a bit of dulce de leche in almost everything and anything sweet here.