Stop 4. Louisiana King Cake

I decided to take a slight detour away from New England in honor of Fat Tuesday and make the Louisiana King Cake.  This is a cake that is traditionally eaten during Mardi Gras.  There is lots of religious significance and there is supposed to be a little baby Jesus baked in there, but most of that freaked me out, so I just went for the cake.

This cake, it turns out, is not a cake at all.  It's really a filled sweet bread.  You make the dough, let it rise, fill it with a mixture of pecans, brown sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and rum, roll it up, shape it, let it rise again, brush it with an egg-sugar wash, bake it and then top it with a sugar glaze and more decorative sugar.  Are you noticing a trend here?

Filling of pecans, spices and rum

The dough is then rolled out, the filling is spread in and then you fold the dough in half and roll it up.
Here it has been filled, rolled and formed into an oval, which is the traditional shape for a King Cake.

Here it has risen for the second time, been egg-washed and baked.

And here it has been glazed and is ready for the application of the decorative sugars.

The application of the decorative sugars are what has allowed this cake to be the thing most likely to be featured on the Cake Wrecks website more than anything else that has ever come out of my kitchen.  I'm mildly ashamed, but if you Google King Cake online, they all kind of look like this, so I guess it's not all bad...

This will be eaten at work, assuming anybody's brave enough to go near it.  Let alone cut it...  I'll post  results in the update.

Next stop: Massachusetts Chocolate Chip Cookie Pie.  Who wants in?