King Cake

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about a plum tart I made, which started a discussion (look at the comments on the plum tart post) about the tradition of making and eating (well, mainly the tradition of eating) King cake. Wikipedia has an interesting entry all about the different cakes and practices in different countries (until my post about the plum tart I hadn’t even realized myself that it was quite so widespread), but this post is about the cake that I know and the custom that my family follows, which is essentially French despite the fact that we aren’t French (don’t ask me how that happened… it just did).

The recipe we use is very simple; you need:

• 500g of puff pastry (which you can buy pre-made in the supermarket)
• 1 large egg yolk beaten with a teaspoon of water (to use as glazing)
• 75g soft unsalted butter (soft means leave it out of the fridge for a couple of hours, don’t annihilate it in the microwave)
• 75g of icing sugar
• 75g ground almonds
• 1 large egg and 1 large egg yolk
• 1 tablespoon of dark rum or cognac

1. Cut out two 20cm circles from the pastry (roll it out to make it bigger if necessary, use a plate or similarly round object roughly the correct size and cut around it) and refrigerate the circles for about half an hour; this helps to avoid shrinking when they cook.
2. Preheat the oven to 180°C.  To make the almond cream which goes in the middle of the cake, whisk the soft butter and icing sugar to a cream in a large bowl.  Gradually mix in the ground almonds, then the egg, the egg yolk and the rum or cognac.  Mix it until it’s smooth and put it in the fridge, again for about half an hour.
3. Place one disc of pastry on a baking sheet and spoon the almond cream into the middle.  With a knife, spread the cream in a circle, leaving a 4cm border all the way around.  Brush a little of the beaten egg/water mixture over the border and put the second pastry disc on top.  With the back of a knife, score the outside edge of the pastry all the way around.
4. Brush the top of the cake with the beaten egg yolk glaze, then refrigerate for 10 minutes.  Repeat the brushing for a deeper colour (but make sure that you don’t brush egg yolk on the outside edge of the cake – it will prevent the pastry from rising).  The last step is for your creative gene.  Using a fork or knife, you can carefully score the surface of the pastry.  When it cookes it keeps the pattern you made in the pastry.  Put the cake in the oven for about 45 minutes, or until it is a golden brown color.

According to the French tradition, it is typically served on or around the 6th of January (Epiphany) and is known as the galette des Rois or the gâteaux des Rois, depending on whether you’re in the North or the South of France (we’re usually in the South but call it by its Northern name, galette des Rois). The féve – a small plastic figurine (usually of a King) – is placed somewhere inside the cake before baking. This way, in theory, even the cake-maker doesn’t even know exactly where it is. Years and years ago this féve was actually a bean; it’s only recently that plastic or porcelain figurines became commonplace.

The use of a bean actually dates from Roman times, when black and white beans were used for voting in elections. The Romans held a festival called Saturnalia in January (with no religious connotations, unlike the modern day tradition which is linked to Epiphany) for which a ‘king’ of the festival would be elected – using the bean method. Eventually this mutated into the more random practice of hiding the bean in a cake before eating it, the ‘king’ no longer being voted for but selected at random.  The person who finds the féve is the ‘King’, and, as well as being able to choose a Queen, gets to wear a paper ‘crown’ which you usually get if you buy a cake in a bakery (as shown with the cake in the picture above).

To serve the cake, the youngest member of the family (which just so happens to be yours truly) has to go under the table, where he or she can no longer see the cake, and call out the name of the person who will get each slice. In this way if the féve happens to be right next to a cut (and clearly visible to the eaters) the slice with the féve can still be assigned to someone fairly (supposedly anyway – I can’t remember the last time I actually crawled under the table and did this).

The cake is also supposed to be divided into 1 slice per person with 1 extra slice remaining. This last slice is intended for the first poor person who knocks on the door – obviously this is an old custom though, since poor people don’t knock on doors anymore – although I don’t know why; this may sound insensitive, but if I was poor and/or homeless and it was the 6th of January, I’d damn well go round knocking on doors to get myself some free cake. I seem to remember that there is a story about how this part of the tradition started, but can’t recall how it goes.  But needless to say, when no poor person comes knocking on our door this remaining slice doesn’t go to waste…

So that’s how King cake is eaten in my family, but the tradition varies from region to region, from country to country, as is the case for so many customs. This is one of the things I like about traditions, and about travelling in fact. By visiting different places, sometimes so far apart you would think that they have few links, if any, you sometimes come across a custom clearly based on the same foundations. Sometimes there are dozens of permutations of what is essentially the same practice. King cake is a great example, with Epiphany celebrated widely (amongst Christians at least) and with variations of King cake all across at least Europe and North America (again, essentially where there is a Christian population). So what about you, my only reader? Do you eat King cake? Do you have a tradition that you follow in your family or country? If you do I’d love to hear about it!