Fat Tuesday

Another Holiday gives me yet another excuse to bake and with it being Mardi Gras week and all I thought I would tackle the king of all Mardi Gras desserts, the King Cake!

Who would have known that a "simple" cake would take about 5hrs to make?!

I guess I should start from the beginning.  This week I am on spring break from college and naturally I came home for the week.  My mom asked me if I could make a dessert for her work because they were having like a
"party" of some sorts (really just having dessert).  Originally I wanted to make some sort of cupcake or something not Mardi Gras related but I decided I only have this chance once a year so I quickly nixed that idea.

A regular cake was out of the question because I accidentally left my decorating tips at my apartment back at school, so I kept coming back to the idea of a King Cake.

One of my friends had called me the day before asking me about how to make the oreo truffles because the chocolate they were using wasn't melting for some reason ( sometimes chocolate is tempramental, see my valentines cake for example).  So my mom asked if I could make the truffles and then just dye the chocolate purple, green, and yellow.

Yet I kept coming back to the King Cake.

So I found a recipe and we got the stuff and I began.  First of all you should know that yeast scares me.  I'm always afraid that I'm not going to let it "bloom" enough so the dough doesn't rise right or I'm going to over mix it so that it falls.

Thankfully I avoided that and when the dough was made I had to let it rise for 2 hrs!  Well while it was doing that I made dinner which consisted of homemade pizza (of course more yeast!) which turned out delicious (and unfortunately no pictures because now its all gone and eaten!).

After it rose I had to make the filling, I omitted the raisins and nuts because
     1. I don't like raisins
     2. I like nuts but not in things, I would rather eat them by themselves
This led the filling to be like a cinnamon roll filling.

Before the oven

Then you roll it out, put the filling in it, roll it back up form it in an oval then cut holes in the dough and let it rise for 45 more minutes

After the oven

The recipe made two cakes one turned out really well and the other "exploded" at the seams, well not really but it didn't look too terribly pretty.


Then came icing the cake, a simple icing is just confectioners sugar and water and then the sprinkles on top.  The store was out of like all Mardi Gras decorations so we had to use pink instead of purple sprinkles but it still looks really festive.

A thing to note though is that the icing hardens rather quickly (especially over a hot cake) so you have to either do a bit then sprinkle or sprinkle fast!

Sprinkling it up makes quite a mess but the finished result is divine!