As part of Mardi Gras season and for my mom's birthday, I baked a king cake. It's a recipe supposedly by Emeril Lagasse, and on the website where I found it, there is a whole story of the king cake tradition in New Orleans. Seeing how my mom is from there, and she was visiting me in Massachusetts over her birthday, it seemed a fitting time to bring this local traditional cake to a new locale. The only Mardi-Gras-style beads we had to decorate te cake with this time were dedicated to remembrance of Hurricane Katrina, which turned out to look nice on the cake, but I didn't actually intend for it to be a Katrina cake and take away from my mom's 60th. The other issue that came up with this once was the available colors in sugar sprinkles. Traditionally for Mardi Gras, it should be purple, green and gold, but I used all kinds of sprinkles that I still had around the house after the holidays. It came out festive enough for a birthday cake, so we all decided to call it good.
I'm still hoping to bring the king cake tradition here. It will only take more people to get involved! I made the cake with a pecan inside, and, as the tradition goes, we cut the cake into 2-inch slices, and the person who got the pecan had to bring the king cake to the next party. In this case, the next party was not really a king cake party, but a birthday gathering for multiple people. My husband had gotten the pecan from the last cake, so he brought the cake to this next party. I wanted to try it again, so I did it in a braided form, and injected the cream cheese filling into sections of the braided cake. It turned into a fun family event, as my toddler also joined in a when it came time to add the colorful sprinkles. I'm posting the pictures of my mom's cake first for ideas on decorations, and I'll post the second cake's pictures shortly. Since I used this existing recipe, I'm just sending the link to it here.
