A Cake for Kings

“Mardi Gras is in our soul.”
-Kim Priez

Growing up in Louisiana means that the colors purple, gold, and green decorate the world through February. All of the stores display their plastic beads, doubloons, and masks alongside their hearts, lace, and cupids. All of the bakeries and grocery stores sell king cakes alongside their pink and red cupcakes.

King cake—tastes a bit like bread; a bit like cake. Neither too sweet, nor too bland. It’s also kind of a party game. A plastic baby doll (supposed to be baby Jesus) is hidden inside the cake, and the person who “gets the baby” is supposed to bring the cake the next year. In my senior English class in high school, we had king cake everyday for a whole month—the person who got the baby brought the snack the next day.

In Georgia you can’t just run to the grocery store for a piece of king cake. So I pulled out my handy-dandy Junior League of Shreveport cookbook that we received as a wedding present and attempted my first ever king cake-baking adventure.

The recipe is not really difficult, but it does take a considerable amount of time. Perfect for a novice cook on a lazy Saturday afternoon. After mixing all of the ingredients together, the dough was so sticky that I couldn’t lift my hands off of the baking mat I was working on. Luckily Rob was able to lend a hand, pouring the flour and holding the mat to the counter as I attempted to knead it all together.

I left it to rise for an hour and a half, then shaped it in a ring, and let it rise for another 40 minutes. Then as it baked it continued to grow. After 30 minutes in the oven, I had a gigantic cake on my hands. Then the icing and colored sprinkles got a little bit out of hand. But, in my opinion, you can never have enough sugar. There’s no place nearby where you can just run out and buy a 1 inch plastic baby, so we had to forego that little detail this time around. Note to self: stock up on plastic babies for king cakes in our future! We took the cake and the homemade ice cream (that Rob is making in the photo above) to a Super Bowl Party on Sunday night, where everyone loved it.