Concha, trenza, pan de muerto, rosca de reyes, and a dedicated deep dive into chocolatín, my personal favorite and the one I've actually done the research on.
Full disclosure before anything else on this page: I am a chocolatín connoisseur. Not casually. I have gone location to location across this city rating them, bad ones included, purely because it’s my favorite pan dulce and someone needed to actually do the work. The best one I’ve found is in here, along with the reasoning, further down this page.
The one everyone already recognizes: a dome of soft, enriched bread under a shell of sugar paste scored into a shell-like pattern, traditionally vanilla or chocolate, though colored versions have become common. If a bakery only sells one thing well, it’s usually this.
A braided sweet bread, made by literally plaiting three ropes of dough before baking, which is what gives it the name (trenza, “braid”). It comes out of the oven with a shine most other pan dulce doesn’t have, and it’s usually sold in a size meant for sharing rather than a single-serving piece.
The seasonal one, baked specifically for Día de Muertos in the weeks around November 1st and 2nd. Round, orange-blossom or anise-scented, and topped with strips of dough shaped and arranged to represent bones, meeting at a center point meant to represent a skull or, in some versions, a teardrop. It disappears from bakery shelves the rest of the year.
An oval wreath of sweet bread studded with candied fruit, made for Día de Reyes on January 6th. A small plastic figurine of a baby is baked inside, and tradition holds that whoever gets the slice with the figurine owes everyone else tamales on February 2nd, Día de la Candelaria, which is the same tamale tradition mentioned over in Mexico City Food Staples.
This is the section I actually have opinions about. A chocolatín is built by laying a bar (or two) of chocolate into a sheet of laminated dough and rolling it, the same basic idea as a French pain au chocolat, but with its own dough and proportions, usually eaten at breakfast alongside coffee. The difference between a great one and a mediocre one comes down to a few specific things: how much actual chocolate is inside versus a thin token layer, whether the dough is laminated properly (real visible layers, not a dense single mass), and whether it’s sold fresh that morning or has been sitting in a case since the day before.
(Placeholder — this is where the actual rankings go: specific bakeries, rated, including the worst ones I’ve tried and why. The secret to the best chocolatín in the city goes here too, once it’s written up properly instead of teased.)
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