no, Elvis is not in the king cake

This weekend I saw the best-looking king cake I’d seen in years. I wish I could say I bought it, but we had so much sweet stuff back at the house that it seemed unnecessary. I regret this now.
Let me explain about the king cake. It’s a New Orleans thing mostly. Between Epiphany and Mardi Gras, New Orleans bakeries make king cakes, which are very similar to coffee cake rings except they have purple, green, and yellow (Mardi Gras colors) sugar sprinkled on the top. Somewhere inside the king cake is concealed a little plastic baby.

The king cakes are a very old tradition, and if you are really interested in that sort of thing, you can look it up on the Web. Accounts vary. The general consensus is that if you find the plastic baby, you have to buy the next king cake, which is a long way from its original intent. Despite its being an old tradition, New Orleans has seen a fair amount of innovation in king cakes in the past 20 years or so.
When I was a little girl, we usually got our king cakes at McKenzies’ Bakery and they were very plain rings, un-iced, with multicolored sugar all over the top. They were a little dry, especially if you didn’t get a freshly baked one. McKenzies’ king cakes were so predictable that you could generally guess where the baby was going to be (one of the corners of the squarish oval, I can’t remember which one now). The big advantage of the McKenzies king cake was that you could get some really huge ones and feed a large group with a single king cake.
By the time I was in junior high, McKenzies innovated and offered an alternative king cake with white icing on top. The dough had been braided and rolled in cinnamon, so it was like a big ring of cinnamon roll. I have always loved cinnamon rolls … except for the white icing. I hate goopy white icing, and will pick it off a pastry whenever possible. Bear this in mind as we go along.
Haydel’s also had fancy king cakes, without so much goopy white icing, and they had a little promotion where every day, one of their king cakes would have a gold baby pendant instead of the plastic baby.
Gambino’s was considered the place to get a good fancy king cake, though. Gambino’s was also the place to get doberge cakes (which I miss very very much) until Maurice’s started giving them serious competition.
Around the time I started grad school, king cakes became even more innovative and you could get them filled with cream cheese, or fruit, or other yummy things. (Not chocolate, though, or maybe the chocolate was never popular. King cakes and chocolate don’t mix, somehow.) I remember bringing some friends to New Orleans for Mardi Gras in 1994 and bringing back a huge, wonderful cream cheese-filled king cake from a small bakery near my parents’ house. Everyone went wild over it.
Over the years, my mom has sent king cakes through the mail to me for Mardi Gras. Of course, you can’t mail a cream cheese-filled cake, because it would spoil, but the plain cakes are all right. But my mom always values convenience over quality, so she would run down to the nearby Sav-A-Center and pick up the most awful, goopy-white-icing-laden king cakes to send. I finally told her not to worry about sending king cakes anymore, my coworkers didn’t seem to appreciate them very much and it was too much for me to eat alone.
McKenzies’ is long gone now, and the place to get a king cake in the New Orleans area these days appears to be Randazzo’s, aka Randazzo’s Goodchildren Bakery of Violet, Louisiana. Their king cakes have become so popular that you can buy them all over the Greater New Orleans area, and they will ship them for you too.
My sister offered to ship me one of the Randazzo’s king cakes this year, because they were available at a coffeeshop right near her house and it would be easy and inexpensive. Plus, my boyfriend had never had any king cake and he was curious about it. So I thought it was a fine idea. (He’s the one who wanted to know if a king cake had a little tiny Elvis in it. These Northerners, sheesh.)
Little did I know that the king cake was going to suffer from Attack of the White Goopy Icing. Apparently this is the norm, now. I think it is pretty gross. Also, although I did not tell my sister this, I think we just had a bad king cake generally. It made my boyfriend ill. I don’t blame Randazzo’s because someone brought in one of their king cakes to work last week and it was very good. I brought the rest of my king cake to work (this was before I found out it disagreed with the Beau) and everyone snapped it up immediately, but this isn’t exactly a product group with gourmet tastes.
However, this weekend I saw just the king cake I would like to have, and it was right here in Austin.
We went to Hyde Park Grill for dinner on Saturday night, because the Beau hadn’t ever been and I was craving their notorious horseshoe sandwich. (No, it doesn’t have horseshoes in it, but it’s very heavy and I can only ever eat about half.) We had a particularly nice dinner there, managing to beat the weekend dinner rush, and we decided to walk over to Quack’s afterwards for coffee and maybe dessert.
And it was at Quack’s that I saw what looked like a traditional, un-iced coffee cake with just a subtle little sprinkle of purple, green, and yellow sugar on the top. I don’t know why I didn’t buy it, it was $10 and that was perfectly reasonable. Sometimes I wonder about my brain. It was prettily wrapped with some curly ribbon on the top. They didn’t put the plastic baby in the king cake itself—I notice that most Austin places don’t do this because I suppose they worry that people won’t know the tradition, will swallow the plastic baby, and sue—but they’d attached a pretty gold-colored plastic baby at the top and it added to the decorative look of the thing.
My boyfriend was pleasantly surprised, too. I’d assured him that not all king cakes were as nasty as the one I’d persuaded him to try earlier in the week, but I think he was suspicious. A good look at that nice coffee-ring king cake restored his faith in me.
So if you are in Austin and you want to celebrate Mardi Gras this year, you might call over to Quack’s and see if they have any of those king cakes left. Don’t go to the grocery and get one of those goopy white-iced monstrosities. Trust me. I only wish I’d realized this sooner, so I could get one now and bring it to work, or at least encourage people to buy their king cakes at Quack’s. Mardi Gras is tomorrow, so it’s a bit late for me to have any effect.
Next year, I hope they have them again, because I think I’m starting a new king cake tradition chez Jette.