By Andrea Meyers

Mardi Gras celebrations around the world involve parades, colorful costumes, masks, music, and of course, food. As the last celebration of the traditional Carnival season, the Mardi Gras festival celebrates the last day before the beginning of the Lenten fasting period. In New Orleans and some other U.S. cities, a king cake decorated with the royal colors purple, green, and gold is part of the Mardi Gras festivities. The colors were chosen in 1872 by that year’s Rex, or king of Mardi Gras, and they represent justice (purple), faith (green), and power (gold). The cakes are enjoyed throughout the festival season between January 6 (Epiphany) and the Tuesday that is 46 days before Easter. This year Mardi Gras falls on February 5.

The traditional cake is a simple rolled brioche-style dough with cinnamon, but demand for king cakes has created an industry with bakeries throughout the Gulf Coast offering rolled cakes with many types of fillings, including cream cheese with various fruits, pecan pralines, chocolate cream, and boozy concoctions made with rum, amaretto, and other popular liquors. If you don’t live on the Gulf Coast, you can order a king cake from one of several shops that ship cakes, or you can make one of your own using the following recipes.

Danno of NOLA Cuisine has a beautiful rolled cake with orange zest and cinnamon flavored dough, a spiced pecan filling, and a bourbon glaze. Bourbon glaze?! Laissez les bon temps roule! (Let the good times roll!)

Amanda and Tyler of What We’re Eating wrote a wickedly funny post to go along with their Ooey Gooey Warm King Cake, which they filled with cream cheese and a mixed berry jam made from strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, and raspberries. That photo with the cream cheese oozing out makes my mouth water!

The King Arthur Flour company sells a King Cake Mix that includes a 1-pound sweet dough mix, almond paste for the filling, white icing mix, and bags of colored sugars…everything you need to make a great rolled king cake.

If rising dough and rolling cake is not your cup of tea, there are some easier options:

Stefani of Cupcake Project took a sweet dough recipe and turned it into a king cake cupcake recipe that she whipped up in her bread machine. The recipe is so good that she won third place in a king cake bake-off! She was particularly pleased when one of the contestants, a bakery owner, asked her if she had a bakery, to which she proudly replied, “No, I have a blog!”

For something even easier, a traditional pound cake can be decorated in king cake style. I whipped up this one, a cream cheese pound cake with bourbon and pecans and added a simple cream cheese glaze to go with the colored sugars.

And of course you can find more king cake recipes right here on FoodieView.

Andrea has a recipe for traditional rolled king cake (pictured top) as well as many other cakes at her cooking blog Andrea’s Recipes.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 28th, 2008 at 7:24 am and is filed under Recipe Roundup. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.