Latin American desserts

Latin American dessert is held together by one ingredient above all: milk caramel. Called dulce de leche in Argentina and Uruguay, manjar blanco in Peru and Chile, cajeta in Mexico and doce de leite in Brazil, this slow-cooked caramelised condensed milk underpins an enormous share of the continent's sweets. Add to it coconut, guava, chocolate (Mexican-style, with cinnamon and almond), condensed milk, and the year's tropical fruit, and you have the building blocks.

The repertoire spans the Iberian inheritance (flan, arroz con leche, churros), the African inheritance (the coconut quindim of Brazil, the cocadas of the Caribbean), and the indigenous inheritance (the maize-and- purple-corn drinks and puddings of the Andes, the cacao traditions of Mexico). Each country has its own canon: Argentine cremoso and chocotorta, Peruvian suspiro limeño and mazamorra morada, Brazilian brigadeiros and chocotone, Mexican rosca de reyes and dulce de batata.

The shared instinct is generosity — Latin American desserts are typically richer, sweeter, and more emphatically dairy-driven than their European cousins.