Let Us Eat Cake
A mission to try all of the region's best king cakes this Carnival Season
Sitting down to write this column, it is late January: a time when the kaleidoscopic machinery of Mardi Gras has well-and-truly have started turning. This year, as a family we are choosing to double—or possibly triple—our king cake intake.
So, when the recent press release from Lieutenant Governor Billy Nungesser’s office appeared in my inbox with the breaking news—“Cannata’s has invented a new flavor of king cake!”—I pulled out my growing list. Apparently, the wizards at this old-line Houma bakery have conspired with the great-grandson of a Bayou Terrebonne moonshiner to produce a booze-inflected king cake made with local corn whiskey and filled with whiskey-soaked pecans. “There goes dry January,” I thought.
Writing down “Cannata’s Ti Can Pecan Whiskey Cake,” I reconsidered the colorful, half-eaten, cream-cheese-flavored number from Chalmette’s Nonna Randazzo’s Bakery currently sitting on the kitchen counter. I like this king cake: plump, moist, and glazed with layers of cream cheese and some kind of sweet, lemony stuff, this was our family’s first Randazzo’s experiment, and it got high marks from all sides of the dinner table last night. We agreed that piling the cream cheese and other flavorings on top as a glaze was an effective substitute for squirting them inside the cake, and also enjoyed the fact that the baby was actually buried inside in traditional, choking-hazard fashion, as opposed to being perched abominably on top in some kind of concession to legal liability.
[Read our 2015 roundup of the region's best local king cakes, here.]
I predict that the king cake bakers of Louisiana will have a banner year in 2021. We’re certainly planning to do our part. Other favorite king cakes we’ve tried so far include Gambino’s (Baton Rouge, Metairie, Lafayette) strawberry and cream-cheese-filled Danish pastry king cake; a luscious Galette des Rois, a traditional French-style king cake made by Poupart’s in Lafayette; and from La Boulangerie bakery in New Orleans, a demented “Elvis” king cake filled with bananas and peanut butter and topped with toasted marshmallows and bacon bits, with a little pig inside instead of a baby. Others on the to-try list include Haydel’s pecan-praline king cake, Ambrosia Bakery’s Zulu king cake (coconut, cream cheese, chocolate icing), and Calandro’s new Royale Cookies king cake, with cookies & cream liquor and vodka in the drizzle to boot. And I’ve heard so many people speaking in hushed tones about the two-filling king cakes from Meche’s Donut King in Lafayette that I am placing an order for a raspberry-cream-cheese-and-lemon-filled number through their website at this very moment. I’m sure there are plenty more that we have yet to get acquainted with. Got a favorite? Let me know so we can add it to the list. In the meantime, I’ll be working out how to lay hands on one of those Ti Can Pecan whiskey king cakes from Cannata’s.
[Get Joy the Baker's recipe for Pull Apart King Cake, here.]
Dry January never stood much of a chance this year. Never mind; this time next month it’ll be Lent. On that note, I’m going find myself another slice of Nonna Randazzo’s.
Happy Mardi Gras.
—James Fox-Smith, publisher