Why?
Long Story!
But here I am back again, and life is going on.
Let’s talk about KING CAKES!
Here’s a nice recipe for two small king cakes – very very basic, and a person who enjoys sweets may want to make it… well… sweeter…
1/2 C warm water;
1 package active dry yeast;1/2 C milk;
1/2 C sugar plus a little more for proofing;
little bit o salt;
6 T butter, real butter please, plus MORE for filling;
2 eggs;
4-5 C flour;
Cinnamon and sugar for the filling.
See, it’s just a bread dough:
Dissolve the yeast in the warm water and sprinkle on a little sugar to get it started proofing.
Scald the milk in a little pan, add the butter to melt it, and the sugar and salt. Let it cool so that it’s not scalding hot – don’t want to kill the yeast! – and mix it with the yeast mixture.
Add the eggs.
Then add the flour, a cup at a time, until it begins to hold together.
Knead it until it gets satiny with an even texture and air bubbles throughout; then put it into an oiled bowl in a warmish location and let rise until doubled in bulk – more or less.
I used the rising time as an opportunity to go look for a plastic baby to hide in the king cake – unfortunately, not easy to find in Seattle. I almost settled for a plastic dinosaur – but ultimately concluded it’d be better not to have anything.
A shame, really.
BUT
it all turned out OK:
Take the risen dough and divide it in two.
Take one of the two and spread/roll/finagle it into a rectangle, 9×14 inches or so (I spread mine until it compeltely covered a small baking sheet.
Then spread it with softened butter – as much as you like – and sprinkle with cinnamon and sugar – again, as much as you like. The more you use, of course, the more sweet it will be.
Roll it like a jelly roll – that is, like a ho-ho – and moisten the edge to seal it; then moisten the ends and stick them together to form a ring.
Really, though, you could leave the edge unsealed, and then use it to do something fancy: I snipped mine into a blunt short fringe with kitchen shears, and then twisted the little fringey bits to make the king cake look a little like a crown. Surely there are other fun embellishments to try…
Repeat this with the other half of the dough. You can also add fillings – though I’m not sure how that affects the cooking time, and I prefer the plain cinnamon types, myself.
Then let the formed king cakes rise again, for as long as you can stand – in the meanwhile, preheat the oven to 375.
Spread them with beaten egg, if you’d like them to have a nice shiny brown surface – though you’ll be likely covering that surface with frosting or sugar anyways -
Bake. Give them ten minutes or so at 375, then turn it down to 350 and keep an eye on them. Baking will probably take 30 minutes… maybe more, maybe less, depending on how thick they are. Leaving a nice open hole in the center of the ring will help them bake more quickly and evenly, of course…
When done, let them cool a bit and then ice them! An easy icing can be made with nothing but powdered sugar and lemon juice – just enough lemon juice to make the sugar drizzly. It takes surprisingly little.
You can either frost with white icing and then sprinkle with purple, gold, and green sugar,
OR,
you can divide the icing into three, dye it purple (red + blue, that is), gold, and green, and decorate it thus.
Colored sugar is probably more exciting, but in Seattle, at least, it is very expensive – food coloring much more affordable.
And the effect is not bad, either!
