It's Good To Be The King Cake

Around The Little Cake Shop in Spanish Fort, you can literally smell Mardi Gras in the oven. The tiny bakery churns out more than 100 king cakes every season. The traditional treat starts as raw ingredients. Flour, yeast, eggs, sugar and butter are tossed into a mixer and swirled into dough. The dough is cut into one pound loaves and allowed to rise.

“Through all those steps when you have other things going on in the shop too,” says Little Cake Shop owner Lorrie Chambers. “It's fun because we do it once a year and it ends up something new to do.” There is a little trick when doing these cakes. You want to work quickly with the dough but not too quickly

“You have to give time for the dough to rise for it to act and the yeast to raise and it makes a prettier king cake if you don't rush it,” says Chambers. Cakes are rolled on to a floured table. The dough is flattened into a rectangle and then prepped with whatever filling strikes the customer's fancy.

“You do a cheese cake, cheese cake and cherry cinnamon streusel cheese cake and blueberry's very popular,” says Chambers. “Then you roll them up and make the traditional shape.” The rolled up cake rings get a liberal coating of egg wash. Then they're baked to a golden brown. The final step is decorating with icing and colored sugars. For those getting their hands dirty, the dough can be the trickiest part.

“It's just tough and ‘pulley’ when you're trying to roll it out,” says baker Karen Jones. “The more you roll the more it comes back in so you want it to expand out and sometimes it doesn't do exactly what you want it to do.” It takes about 30 minutes to pound out each cake, but the real reward is boxing it and sending it off.