First Post

This is my first test post. I guess I should show a couple dishes that I've made lately. Mainly I cook Cajun/Creole food from my home city of New Orleans. As it is Mardi Gras season, I got the urge to make my first King Cake. For those of you who haven't had the pleasure of attending Mardi Gras or growing up in New Orleans, a King Cake is a traditional Mardi Gras treat. You only really have them starting on 12th Night after Christmas up until Mardi Gras day. After that you have to go without for the rest of the year. That is, if you don't make your own!

For my King Cake I decided to go with a Brioche bread dough, which I would make into 3 portions to fill with cinnamon and sugar and then braid together and shape into a ring. I used the Brioche recipe from Bread: A Baker's Book of Techniques and Recipes by Jeffrey Hamelman. I highly recommend this book to anyone who'd like a thorough education in baking breads. I cut the recipe in half as I only wanted to make a small King Cake.

Once I had let the dough rise and degassed several times I cut it into 3 portions (a digital scale comes in very handy for this task). I rolled out each portion of dough into a 12"x9" rectangle which I brushed with butter and sprinkled VERY liberally with cinnamon and sugar. Then, starting with the far (long) edge of the rectangle, I rolled each portion up into a long cylander. I rolled these dough "snakes" out with my hands to make each one of them longer until they were all about 18" long. After braiding them together I ended up with the picture you see on the right. I brushed on an egg wash and baked the King Cake on my pizza stone in the oven.

When I took it out from the oven, I couldn't wait for it to rest and cool down. So I put a simple icing of powdered sugar and milk to coat the cake and then added the traditional Purple, Green, and Gold sugars to the cake. You can see the final results of my first King Cake below. The only things that I think I would change next time are to add more cinnamon and sugar and do a whole recipe of the brioch so I'd have more King Cake to enjoy!