As the rest of the country stares down the barrel of January, sobered by New Year's resolutions, the city is just easing into Carnival
The first few months of the year are among the busiest for bakeries in New Orleans. As the rest of the country stares down the barrel of January, sobered by New Year’s resolutions, the city is just easing into Carnival, the season of revelry and indulgence that lasts from Three Kings Day (also known as Epiphany) to Fat Tuesday, which immediately precedes the start of Lent. The weeks are marked by parties, by parades, and by pastry, most specifically king cake: a wreath-shaped confection made with a yeasted dough—the kind you’d use for brioche or sticky buns—and finished with white icing and a shower of crystallized sugar that’s dyed purple, green, and gold.
King cake is rooted in religious tradition—it’s a Catholic custom that’s believed to have been adapted from an ancient Roman one—but in New Orleans it’s also a “huge economic boon,” Bronwen Wyatt, a baker and a recipe developer, told me recently. “Typically, Thanksgiving through Christmas is a busy time—and then, in other parts of the country, it dies.” It’s considered sacrilege, even among the secular, to make or eat a king cake before or after Carnival. In the past decade or so, the season has become a frenzied pageant of baking innovation.
“Even the larger king-cake bakeries are pushing the boundaries now,” Wyatt said as she stood in the kitchen of her shotgun-style Treme house. She poked at a mass of dough that had been proofing in a pan, deeming it more than ready to go into the oven. For several years, Wyatt sold king cakes through a small business called Bayou Saint Cake. Now she offers a king-cake-making class online, adding a new flavor—Funfetti, honey-wheat pretzel, sweet potato with cardamom meringue—to her repertoire each season.
Half an hour later, we cut into slices so hot that I burned the roof of my mouth, and so luscious with sour cream, butter, and cinnamon that I didn’t mind. Among Wyatt’s mise en place was a quart container full of tiny gold plastic babies. In ancient Rome, the antecedent to the king cake was baked with a dried bean inside it; whoever found it in their slice would be crowned king or queen for the day. In France, the bean in a gâteau or a galette des rois (the latter made with puff pastry) is known as a fève, meaning “fava.” The word has become a catchall for any tiny trinket hidden in a cake. In New Orleans, the most common féve is a pink plastic baby, popularized by a bygone chain called McKenzie’s Pastry Shoppes and often assumed to represent the infant Jesus—though, in 1990, the company’s former president claimed otherwise. “Why we picked this, I don’t know, it was cute,” he told the Times-Picayune.
Per local tradition, the person who gets the fève is responsible for bringing a king cake to the next party, or to the office, or to school, where it’s served as a weekly Carnival treat. “Everyone hoped they didn’t get the baby, because it meant you had to get the next king cake, and we were always broke,” a New Orleans native named Bryan Wilson told me. “When I share a king cake outside of NOLA, everyone wants the baby—and nobody ever gets the next cake.”
The February days I spent in the city were mostly muggy and gray, punctuated by downpours, but my spirit couldn’t be dampened as I zigzagged all over town. King cake found me even when I wasn’t looking: at a kiosk at the airport, which sold individually wrapped slices and nips of king-cake-flavored rum; at dinner at Brigtsen’s, a Creole restaurant uptown, where king-cake bread pudding was a dessert special. Upon waking at Hotel Peter and Paul, on the grounds of a refurbished Catholic church in the Marigny, I stumbled over to the Elysian Bar, a restaurant in the old rectory. As the young resident baker, Curtis Litwiller, plaited ropes of dough, he explained that his king-cake recipe was inspired by coffee cake but also by East Asian milk breads, which use a water roux to insure an extra-fluffy crumb.
At Ayu Bakehouse, I enjoyed a king-cake latte, topped with colored sugar, and a wedge of “Croissant City” king cake, made from a laminated dough. I sampled a savory variety at Bywater Bakery, made by stuffing a garlic-bread dough with a creamy mixture of shrimp and crawfish. (The Parmesan cheese on top was dyed in the Mardi Gras colors.) At King Cake Hub, a pop-up in a Mid-City brewery which carries cakes from dozens of bakeries, old and new, accessories for sale included copies of The Big Book of King
