We happened to be in New Orleans during the first weekend of Mardi Gras this year, and had a fantastic time. The daytime neighborhood parades and festive, communal spirit were really amazing to experience in person. And in a sign that a Mardi Gras celebration of sorts would make perfect sense for us when we returned to New York, I received a Brooklyn Public Library notice the day we left NOLA that the John Besh cookbook I placed on hold a few weeks back was ready for pick-up!
We ate at John Besh's restaurant August during our latest New Orleans trip, and had a wonderful, five-course meal (more details will be available soon on my other blog), so I was particularly excited to open up this cookbook. The first recipe I decided to try because of the Mardi Gras tie was Besh's King Cake recipe.
Upon first glance, the recipe seemed fairly simple to construct, and the user comments for the online version of the recipe on Epicurious provided some helpful tips as well. I also made several other alterations to fit what I had on hand and/or the techniques I thought would be best. For the cake, I used 2% milk and placed the dough on a parchment paper-lined cookie sheet for baking. For the icing, I substituted 2% milk for the sweetened condensed milk (simply because I didn't know what to do with all of the leftover condensed milk), reduced the amount of powdered sugar to 1 cup (to reach the consistency I wanted), and dyed the colored sugars at home using regular evaporated cane sugar instead of buying colored sugars. And per the Epicurious comments, I reduced the baking time to 22 minutes, which led to a "healthy" browning on the bottom of the cake. In the future, I'll probably go down to 20 minutes?
Otherwise though, I followed the recipe as is, and while I somehow got confused during the braiding process (key = use a large surface to roll out of the dough and carefully do the braiding!), it did in fact turn out to be pretty seamless to put the cake together. The result tasted really great too - lots of cinnamon and citrus flavor, perfect amount of moisture v. breadiness that other king cakes can have, and a nice amount of sweetness from the icing. I think the icing may have been a little lemon-y for at least Andy's tastebuds though, so I may reduce that fresh juice in the future or add a bit of fresh orange juice as well for a different flavor?
This will definitely be an annual tradition though - and the best part is that you get SO much cake from this recipe, that you absolutely need to throw a Mardi Gras party to consume it!
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