King Cake and Mardi Gras

For many years of my growing up life (2nd-10th grade) I lived in the suburbs of New Orleans. I went to school either in New Orleans or at the border of it for much of that time. And so, even though I no longer observe Ash Wednesday or Lent or Easter (since I am now Jewish), I do at least acknowledge Mardi Gras. Mardi Gras never seemed like a religious festival. Well, how can weeks of parades with people on floats tossing beads, doubloons, plastic cups and trinkets really be considered religious? LOL I can't really celebrate that part of it with just our small household though.

Anyway, each Friday in the 3 weeks to a month preceding Mardi Gras, we would have a King Cake party in school. Whoever got the baby was required to bring in the cake for the next week. In all those years, I don't believe I ever had a homemade king cake. They were ubiquitous in the New Orleans area. Most of the time we would mostly get either grocery store cakes or McKenzie's, occasionally Gambino's, and rarely we would get the King Cake from Tastee Donuts - hands down the best IMO, although native New Orleanians would pummel me with plastic babies for dissing the traditional favorite McKenzie's even though they went out of business a few years ago. Although I understand that Tastee Donuts purchased the McKenzie's recipe and will be carrying on the tradition. Who knew King Cake could be so political?

Anyway, a store bought king cake in this SoCal neck of the woods was not happening. I called around quite a bit and at every bakery I called , when I asked if they had King Cake for Mardi Gras, I was universally met with "what?" So I pulled out my old "Louisiana Entertains" cookbook -the one from the 1984 Louisiana World's Fair- and I made a king cake. Of course it was huge, so I packed the boys and their dinners up along with the king cake and brought them all down to DH's office where there were people to share with. The boys got to see their Daddy, eat their dinner, have a cake midweek(!) and then the little one fell asleep on the way home. I'd say it was 5 hours of baking well spent. And now I know why they are usually store bought (although this one was delicious if I do say so myself)

In an amusing aside, nearly everyone at DH's office either said or gave a look that said "what kind of a cake is that?"