A Crowning Moment for the New Orleans King Cake

For bakeries in New Orleans, the first few months of the year are among the busiest. As the rest of the country stares down the barrel of January, sobered by New Year’s resolutions, the city is just easing into Carnival, the season of revelry and indulgence that lasts from Three Kings Day (also known as Epiphany) to Fat Tuesday, which immediately precedes the start of Lent. The weeks are marked by parties, by parades, and by pastry, most specifically king cake: a wreath-shaped confection made with a yeasted dough—the kind you’d use for brioche or sticky buns—and finished with white icing and a shower of crystallized sugar that’s dyed purple, green, and gold.

King cake is rooted in religious tradition—it’s a Catholic custom that’s believed to have been adapted from an ancient Roman one—but in New Orleans it’s also a “huge economic boon,” Bronwen Wyatt, a baker and a recipe developer, told me recently. “Typically, Thanksgiving through Christmas is a busy time—and then, in other parts of the country, it dies,” she said. It’s considered sacrilege, even among the secular, to make or eat a king cake before or after Carnival. In the past decade or so, the season has become a frenzied pageant of baking innovation.

“Even the larger king-cake bakeries are pushing the boundaries now,” Wyatt said as she stood in the kitchen of her shotgun-style Treme house. She poked at a mass of dough that had been proofing in a pan, deeming it more than ready to go into the oven. For several years, Wyatt sold king cakes through a small business called Bayou Saint Cake. Now she offers a king-cake-making class online, adding a new flavor—Funfetti, honey-wheat pretzel, sweet potato with cardamom meringue—to her repertoire each season.

Half an hour later, we cut into slices so hot that I burned the roof of my mouth, and so luscious with sour cream, butter, and cinnamon that I didn’t mind. Among Wyatt’s mise en place was a quart container full of tiny gold plastic babies. In ancient Rome, the antecedent to the king cake was baked with a dried bean inside it; whoever found it in their slice would be crowned king or queen for the day. In France, the bean in a gâteau or a galette des rois (the latter made with puff pastry) is known as a fève, meaning “fava.” The word has become a catchall for any tiny trinket hidden in a cake. In New Orleans, the most common féve is a pink plastic baby, popularized by a bygone chain called McKenzie’s Pastry Shoppes and often assumed to represent the infant Jesus—though, in 1990, the company’s former president claimed otherwise. “Why we picked this, I don’t know, it was cute,” he told the Times-Picayune.

Per local tradition, the person who gets the fève is responsible for bringing a king cake to the next party, or to the office, or to school, where it’s served as a weekly Carnival treat. “Everyone hoped they didn’t get the baby, because it meant you had to get the next king cake, and we were always broke,” a New Orleans native named Bryan Wilson told me. “When I share a king cake outside of NOLA, everyone wants the baby—and nobody ever gets the next cake.”

The February days I spent in the city were mostly muggy and gray, punctuated by downpours, but my spirit couldn’t be dampened as I zigzagged all over town. King cake found me even when I wasn’t looking: at a kiosk at the airport, which sold individually wrapped slices and nips of king-cake-flavored rum; at dinner at Brigtsen’s, a Creole restaurant uptown, where king-cake bread pudding was a dessert special. Upon waking at Hotel Peter and Paul, on the grounds of a refurbished Catholic church in the Marigny, I stumbled over to the Elysian Bar, a restaurant in the old rectory. As the young resident baker, Curtis Litwiller, plaited ropes of dough, he explained that his king-cake recipe was inspired by coffee cake but also by East Asian milk breads, which use a water roux to insure an extra-fluffy crumb.

At Ayu Bakehouse, I enjoyed a king-cake latte, topped with colored sugar, and a wedge of “Croissant City” king cake, made from a laminated dough. I sampled a savory variety at Bywater Bakery, made by stuffing a garlic-bread dough with a creamy mixture of shrimp and crawfish. (The Parmesan cheese on top was dyed in the Mardi Gras colors.) At King Cake Hub, a pop-up in a Mid-City brewery which carries cakes from dozens of bakeries, old and new, accessories for sale included copies of “The Big Book of King Cake,” a 2021 compendium by a local writer named Matt Haines, and a knife with a sparkly acrylic handle that read “STAYS IN BOX.” It’s a point of pride among king-cake devotees that someone will want another slice soon.

If I had to choose a favorite king cake, it would be the one at Lagniappe Bakehouse (the name is the Cajun word for “a little something extra”), which was opened last year, in Central City, by Kaitlin Guerin, a New Orleans-born former dancer, and Lino Asana, a Cameroonian-born filmmaker. Theirs had a rich and flaky exterior that brought to mind the tenderest strudel, with squiggles of condensed-milk icing and a soft but structured crumb that Guerin modelled in part on her favorite panettone. Most compelling was a subtle touch of heat: in addition to cinnamon, she uses ground grains of paradise, a spicier cousin of cardamom that’s native to West Africa.

A particularly tiny brown-skinned plastic baby tumbled out of a crevice in my slice—my first fève of the trip. “I’ve had people come back and tell me, ‘Oh, I’m so happy that I got this little Black baby in my king cake,’ ” Guerin said. “Representation matters.” It was one of several ways I observed bakers getting creative with their fèves. The bronzed galette des reines (“queen cake”) at Levee Baking Co., filled with pecan frangipane and candied satsuma, comes with a ceramic moon face made by a local artist named Jackie Brown. Jamboree Jams, a preserves company, commissions fèves for its cakes from Panacea Theriac, better known as Miss Pussycat, a beloved musician, ceramicist, and puppeteer who lives and works in the Bywater with her partner and bandmate, who goes by Quintron.

Theriac is a member of a Carnival krewe that organizes a miniature-themed parade called tit Rex, known for its shoebox floats and tiny “throws”—the objects, including beads, that are handed out to spectators. Over the years, Theriac has made thousands of ceramic throws, including a coin-size king cake, and a few seasons ago it occurred to her that they would work as fèves, too. This year’s batch included a red devil and a sculpted tableau of a house with a tree, each no bigger than an acorn.

“Part of my pay is I get a king cake,” Theriac told me. Last year’s was ill-fated. “Every year, Quintron and I have this special party called the Maritime Ball. Everybody dresses up in underwater wear. I put the cake up in our kitchen. And then a friend of mine—I won’t say her name, she was dressed as the evil twin sister of Julie McCoy, from ‘The Love Boat’—just picked the whole cake up.” Theriac showed me a photo of a cake that looked as if it had been attacked by a wild animal. “She was, like, I’m trying to find the fève! It was a strawberry chocolate. I had one little bite of it,” Theriac said. “This year, I’m hiding the king cake.”

On my last morning in New Orleans, I woke up early to drive to Dong Phuong, a Vietnamese bakery on the eastern edge of the city, before it opened, at 8 A.M. Among the many people who had recommended it was Bryan Ford, a New Orleans-raised baker and the author of a 2024 cookbook called “Pan y Dulce,” featuring recipes for Latin American breads and pastries, including a rosca de reyes. “It’s all about technique, and their technique is flawless,” Ford said of Dong Phuong, which was founded by a family of refugees in 1982 and has been selling king cakes since 2008.

By the time I pulled into the parking lot, directly off the highway, at about seven-thirty, dozens of people were already lined up. According to Mimi Ducombs, the manager, the bakery makes between seventeen hundred and two thousand king cakes a day, and they usually sell out before lunchtime. At the head of the line I found a slim, bearded, middle-aged man named Ramon Doucette. “The goal was to be here for six,” he said. “I only ran one red light.” Doucette had given up king cake himself, owing to heartburn, but was there at his daughter’s behest—a far cry from his own childhood, during which, he claimed, he’d swallowed more than one plastic baby to avoid telling his father, a cop, that he was on the hook for the next cake. “My intestines are still messed up,” he said.

The line began to move, quickly. A woman dressed in a sweatshirt emblazoned with a sequinned king cake, her hair pulled back with a plastic king-cake clip, told me, convincingly, “Mardi Gras is my life.” Another woman asked if she could show me a TikTok she’d made, under the handle Sapphic Southerner, set to TLC’s “No Scrubs.” “Some of y’all wanna be treated like a Dong Phuong king cake so badly, but you walk around acting like a Rouses king cake,” she says, referring to a chain of Louisiana supermarkets whose owner was photographed among Trump supporters in D.C. on January 6th—Three Kings Day—in 2021. “People are not gonna stand in line for your bullshit.”

I bought a variety of cakes—pecan, durian, coconut—and brought them to a friend’s house for a taste test. Each was shaped like a snugly closed horseshoe with scalloped golden edges, and slathered thickly in cream-cheese frosting. I’d eaten enough king cake for a lifetime, yet I couldn’t stop shaving slice after buttery slice and scraping extra frosting off the side of the box. Even the durian was irresistible, its distinctive, divisive flavor tamed by sugar and fat. I left my friends with large slabs to bring to parties over the weekend, and packed up the rest to take home. At the airport, I got a taste of celebrity. More than one traveller took note of my giant labelled paper bag. Near security, I bumped Dong Phuong boxes with a woman heading home from a conference and compared notes on how we’d obtained our stashes. As I sat at my gate, a man passing by widened his eyes. “Oh, my goodness,” he said. “Good job.” ♦