I adore any holiday centered around food, which is why Mardi Gras has a special place in my heart. I made tiny little king cakes for Wine + Market, which I filled with a caramel icing and toasted pecan mixture. They were a hit and inspired me to make a giant king cake to rival any New Orleans bakery!
Right out of the oven...
Dressed and ready to go!
When my boyfriend’s family decided to have a Mardi Gras party, I quickly volunteered to bring the cake! Most of the king cake recipes I found were for plain brioche-type doughs, braided, baked, and iced with a simple confectioner’s sugar and milk concoction, then sprinkled with colored sugar. Others called for a ring of dough, filled with a nut mixture or cream cheese icing.
so pretty as is...
Being the baking overachiever that I am (and if I’m going to go to all that trouble to make brioche, why NOT pull out all the stops?), I created a king cake with two fillings. That way, I could get the pretty twisty look I was going for AND have a filled cake.
I used Julia Child’s brioche recipe (it is butter-licious and has NEVER failed me, despite taking a bit of time to rise) and after the second rise, I divided it into two 18-inch ropes.
I rolled each rope out to an elongated rectangle measuring about 3×18 inches and spooned a cream cheese/sugar/egg mixture along one portion and used a praline filling for the other.
wearing signature mardi gras colors...
Then I pressed and sealed the edges of each rope together, so that I had two filled ropes, which I could then twist together.
While baking, some of the filling did leak out, but I just scraped it up and placed it in the center of the finished king cake.
Ta-dah! It was really moist and delicious and disappeared within minutes…I didn’t even get a second piece! My little plastic baby is back in his hiding place, amongst all my miscellaneous baking goodies, just waiting to make his debut again next year!
One Comment
This looks great Brigitte!