Friday, February 1, 2008

Mardi Gras - King Cake!

It's that time of year again. When people do crazy things for little plastic beads. For me, I think of all my Millsaps friends from Louisiana and the couple of Mardi Gras weekends I spent in New Orleans and Lafayette eating delicious cajun food. Then, being the sugar lover that I am, I think of King Cake and all that gooey sugary goodness on the inside and the outside.


My co-worker, Erica, married a boy from Louisiana and inherited a cookbook full of his mothers Louisiana recipes. She has been kind enough to share some with us, the latest of which is this delicious Louisiana King Cake recipe. This recipe could easily be made into a regular breakfast cinnamon roll as well.

I did learn some things...

I attempted some French Bread a couple of weeks ago and didn't do well on getting the dough to rise. It tasted good but was heavy. This time I did better. Ryan keeps our house on a cool 68 year round. This is not prime temperature to allow dough to rise. Another food blogger, FoodieBride, has a nifty setting on her oven for dough that keeps the oven at something around 9oF. I am not this lucky. So, before I started mixing the dough I turned my oven to the lowest setting, warm (170F). I left it on while I prepped the dough. When the oven was preheated, I turned it off. When the dough was ready, I put it in the oiled bowl, covered, etc. The oven still felt too hot. I put the bowl in the oven but left the door slightly open for the first 20-30 minutes. Then, when the oven got down to a more normal "room temperature" (not Ryan's normal, but normal people's normal) I shut the door. It took about an hour to more than double!

I also learned that when Ryan says things like "I don't like King Cake", I should just ignore him and continue baking. When I was done baking and decorating, I gave him a small slice to taste. When he got to a break point in his favorite XBox360 game, I heard a convincing "mmmm" coming from the couch. Five minutes later, a second (and three times larger) piece was requested. If the way to the man's heart is truly the stomach... an night of Davis Spaghetti and fresh baked King Cake should do the trick! Successful night of baking.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.

background image