king cake, in the mail and in the oven
Two years ago, on a sunny Saturday afternoon in New Orleans, I made my first (and only) visit to the King Cake Hub. Set up on the long, narrow side porch of a 19th-century mansion that now functions as a haunted house and escape room venue, the Hub was basically a tunnel of king cakes. Boxes of cakes blocked the light, weighing down metal shelves and teetering in precarious stacks. To take a step inside was to be surrounded with every flavor and filling imaginable, from bakeries across New Orleans and greater Louisiana.
The purpose of the Hub was to bring all kinds of king cakes — from popular brands, up-and-coming bakeries and everything in-between — to one centralized location to sell. It’s convenient, genius, and it’ll break you out of a king cake rut. That afternoon, at the beginning of the only Mardi Gras season I’ve ever spent entirely in New Orleans, I was overwhelmed. I chose a cake from a new-to-me bakery, my friends grabbed another, and at a gas station across the street we picked up a few six packs and snagged a couple packs of disposable cutlery before driving to the nearby bayou and spreading out with our goods.
The whole impromptu trip was as perfect as it sounds. We hacked at our king cake with a plastic knife and washed down bites with Abita Strawberry. We were a New Orleans cliché, and I’ve thought about that day so many times in the months of pandemic since, an example of the perfect, mundane, old normal.
I have no memory whatsoever of how the king cake tasted. Was it filled? Heavily iced? Dense? Light? No clue. I’m sure it was delicious. What I do remember, though, is the act of eating it, sawing off a chunk and leaning my back against the rough bark of a live oak, getting my hands sticky with sugar sprinkles, the sensation of the fizzy, salty beer breaking up the lingering taste of icing with every gulp.
King cake, I think, is meant to be consumed in some kind of motion, mid-activity. Hold it in your hand, balance it on a paper towel. Bring it to the parade route. Eat it first thing to sop up a hangover or while you’re getting ready for a Mardi Gras ball to prevent one. Grab one in a pinch at the grocery store — it’ll be fine, but not great — or drive out to New Orleans East at 8 a.m. if it’s that kind of day. Either way, dig in immediately, with friends and without thinking too much about it. King cake goes with everything.
Outside of New Orleans, in the sadder, duller rest of the world where I happen to live, that spontaneity doesn’t translate. Years I can’t make it to Mardi Gras in person, I order a cake or two, from Haydel’s or Dong Phuong or both. I pay more in shipping than the cost of the cake, and it’s worth every penny. I eat a slice each night for dessert, and one most mornings for breakfast, too.
It tastes great, but it’s not quite right. It’s sterile, climate-controlled, cut with a sharp knife and served on a plate.
It’s better than nothing.
This year, I’m lucky enough to get to take a work trip to New Orleans a couple of weeks before Mardi Gras. I’m already planning to fly home with a cake from Haydel’s, which will slide perfectly under the seat in front of me. (I know this from experience.) Haydel’s cakes are classic: braided pastry dough in an oblong ring, heavy on the cinnamon and topped with fondant icing and purple, green and yellow sprinkles. They’re airy and sweet and taste exactly the same, year after year.
So with Haydel’s in my future, I recently decided to give myself a week-long sugar high thanks to two more unconventional king cakes. The first, I ordered from Dong Phuong, a Vietnamese-owned bakery in New Orleans East whose cream-cheese-filled cakes are the definition of decadence. Mine arrived last week, sideways on my doorstep but no worse for the wear, and as soon as I rescued it from the cold, I dug in. Dong Phuong’s cakes are denser than most, more sheet than ring, and the cream cheese muffles and smooths out the sharpness of the cinnamon.
Cut a piece from the center of a Dong Phuong cream cheese cake, and it’s downright hefty. Two bites of this thing have to contain enough sugar to hit your daily allowance, and it’s a small act of grace that there’s no nutrition label. Your teeth will start to hurt after you inhale an entire square of the stuff, but it’s a gluttonous, satisfying kind of ache. You’ll also be full for hours. You might think you should swear off king cake for a while.
Or you might, like I did, start baking. Which brings me to the second cake I’m working my way through: a traditional French galette des rois, which I made from scratch earlier this week.
I’d always been curious about these cakes, which look and taste almost nothing like their New Orleans cousins. They’re puff-pastry based — read: intimidating — and filled with frangipane, which is something I’d only ever heard of on “The Great British Bakeoff.”
Galettes des rois are also, it turns out, pretty easy to make, if you have the patience to take puff pastry in and out of the fridge several times over the course of a day. I used this recipe, and because it didn’t specify instructions for the puff pastry portion, I went with Claire Saffitz’s shortcut puff, which was simple, easy and made enough leftover dough that I’m going to make some kind of savory tart soon, using random things leftover in my fridge.
The verdict? My galette des rois behaved exactly as the recipe indicated it would and puffed up beautifully. I even (sort of) pulled off decorating the top with a paring knife. The finished product tasted like a giant almond croissant — which makes me feel great about continuing my all-king-cake breakfast diet indefinitely.