King Cake

Well it's Mardi Gras time (in Cajun, that would be Fat Tuesday). To be honest, it has snuck up on me - but that doesn't mean I can't celebrate with sweets! I'm not sure how the King Cake became so synonymous with Mardi Gras, since the idea of this cake is to celebrate Epiphany - you know, when the 3 kings came to see baby Jesus, generally celebrated on January 6th. Thus the tradition of putting a toy baby in the cake - if you get the baby, you are king for the day! After a VERY long lunch conversation with one of my coworkers about how the baby is creepy, I've decided to leave the baby out of my cake this year. Now this cake is more what you would think of when talking about coffee cake - more like a bread really. The recipe I used is from Emeril, of course. There are two traditional fillings - a cinnamon sugar or cream cheese, of course, I went for cream cheese!!

Dough, before resting. This is a typical dough, where you knead it on the stand mixer for a while.

Dough after resting with filling. I didn't have enough room on my board, so my roll is a little smaller than in the recipe.

Here's the roll before resting. Notice that I didn't do so well with pinching my ends together.

Cake out of the oven. Since my cake was smaller and thus more compact that the recipe, I needed to cook it for longer to make sure it was done in the middle.

The icing. Rather than make colored sugar, I colored my icing in the traditional colors of New Orleans - purple, green and gold.

My iced cake. I can never wait until the cake is cool enough, so it always runs all over...

Here's a look at the inside. The bread has a nice golden color from egg yokes. Yum! Since this is a giant batch, it's coming with me to work tomorrow, you lucky people you!!