I’m posting about a week after the usual King Cake cutoff date, but there is a good reason. And it’s not because the little King Cake fairy below took so long to get beautiful for her close up! No plastic baby here. She’s a french fève so it’s worth the wait since it looks like she copied her gown from Elsa in ‘Frozen’.

But I digress.

Like most locals my family went the take out route when it came to King Cake. It was always a treat when my father would come through the back door carrying the big box with its yeasty, sugary, vanilla-ey, aroma. We’d hover around the kitchen table like a cloud of flies until the box was opened and the slices torn off. Daddy would pour a little of his coffee into my glass of milk (yes, addiction started early…) and I’d be hard at it, stuffing the cake in and trying to avoid my mother who’d be on us about how we should “sit down and stop spreading crumbs all over.”

Back then my cooking skills were limited to helping stir roux and shelling peas on the porch. Cut to the present and I decided that it was past time to learn how to do it myself. To that end I conducted a bit of research on King Cake, the history, the types, the fillings, and the favors baked inside.

The Louisiana tradition was imported from France where two distinct types of King Cake are on offer. There’s the puff pastry version with frangipane filling called Galette des Rois preferred by Parisians and other northerners, and there’s the Savoy style that prevails in the south and is similar to the Spanish cake, which is called a Rosca de Reyes.

For my first attempt I thought it would be fun to whip up the puff pastry version and I envisioned a quick and easy time of it using pre-made puff pastry. A friend explained how she’d seen a French chef on a You Tube video take several sheets of the pastry and “glue” them together with a little water. This, she said, would result in a terrific rise and a gorgeous, flaky galette. Sadly, however, this proved not to be the case. Gluing them with the water resulted in a permanent bond rendering them brown on the bottom and peel away slimy above. I used my finger to remove the almond filling before disposing of the limp remains.

So scratch that. Onto the traditional. For this I consulted some local sources and ended up with a difficult to roll out, silly putty like dough that had silly putty like flavor and practically bounced off the bottom of the garbage can into which it was dumped.

What to do, what to do? Couldn’t believe that someone who’d cooked as long as I have could have failed so miserably. All I could think was, “it’s just a freaking sweet roll dough…why the problem?” And that’s when it hit me. I already had a no fail sweet roll recipe that would be perfect after a few tweaks. So I minimally tweaked (and was so happy that I was on the verge of twerking, but resisted the urge). Once filled, baked & iced it turned out to be the keeper.

The dough is lovely. It’s very delicate and should feel sorta like a flabby ass (same temperature too) so you need to roll it out gently. For the filling I wanted to go with the traditional cinnamon sugar pecan version but thought that the addition of fig preserves and lemon zest would be a winner and it was. I used spreadable fig preserves for this but I think that to really knock the ball outta the park you would need to combine the preserves with quartered whole fig preserves. You used to be able to find these in the grocery store in glass jars but I didn’t see any and didn’t put any up last summer so perhaps next year.

For the second rise and the baking I put it on a pizza stone, but a thick cookie sheet will do fine as well. Last but not least in keeping with the theme of simplicity I did not braid it, although you could do this if you like.

The glaze was the usual confectioner’s sugar with cream drizzled over the top and anointed with edible glitter. I spiked the glaze with a little rum and luster powder which gave it a pearly glow and it was showtime!