When Dominick Lee was in elementary school in the 1990s, every year for Twelfth Night, the teacher would bring a king cake for the class to share. He and his classmates would wait for their slices decorated with purple, gold and green sugars eager to see which piece had a tiny plastic baby hidden inside. Whoever found it was responsible for bringing another king cake to school the next week, and the cycle would continue through Carnival season, right up until Mardi Gras.
The colorful cake is more than a dessert it’s the flavor of the city. And a diverse community of bakers are adapting the Carnival specialty to their own tastes.
photo: Adobe
January and February mean that it’s king cake season: Bakeries all over Louisiana churn them out by the purple-green-and-gold thousands, many of them containing a plastic baby that symbolizes, to the one who finds it in their slice, luck, prosperity, and the responsibility to provide the next king cake. “But what we see today is quite different from the original celebration,” says Liz Williams, the founder and president of the Southern Food and Beverage Museum in New Orleans. Here, Williams takes us through how the king cake tradition has evolved (and if you’ve ever gotten the baby, you’ll be glad times have changed).