Week 7: King Cake

King Cake

Oddly enough, we didn’t really want to dive into breads this year because they are a year of their own. We selected a very small number of them to make this year and, turns out, we scheduled two in consecutive weeks!! Babka was not originally on our list for last week, but my oldest daughter’s birthday was last week and she requested babka so we moved it for her. Since we had never made babka or king cake, we had no idea we would be making enriched dough two weeks in a row…but, here we are!!

With Mardi Gras in full swing (sort of) we wanted to make a King cake. King cake is believed to have originated in France as a way of celebrating Three King’s Day or Epiphany…the arrival of the three kings. In France, these “cakes” look a lot different from the Mardi Gras staple. In France, they are called gallettes de rois and are puff pastry with an almond filling and, might I add, look much prettier than the American version. In the US, the king cake is a sweet bread that is braided and usually has some sort of filling and is topped with a glaze or frosting. They are usually baked in a ring shape to signify a crown and have a small trinket baked in them. If you prefer the baby trinket, don’t worry, it really doesn’t mean you’re next to have a baby. The baby symbolizes Jesus not your fertility. If it shows up in your piece, it means either you’re “king for a day”, have to host the next party, or provide the next cake depending upon who you ask. That’s a brief history for you.

We were too far in before we realized the king cake was virtually a cinnamon and cream cheese babka. Also, when would we have another chance to make one after Mardi Gras?? After our success of last week’s enriched dough, we got a little cocky and tried some changes. We flew too close to the sun. Not really, but, it felt like it.

None of our recipe books or magazines contained a king cake recipe so we had to go to the internet to find one. Aubrey wanted the traditional version with the cinnamon and cream cheese filling rather than some of the unique ones that were all over the internet. I really want to try some from www.louisianacookin.com but those will have to wait for another day.

We used the recipe from this blog and, seriously, what a clever name!!

https://senseandedibility.com/mardi-gras-king-cake/

Ingredients

For the Enriched Bread Dough

• 1 cup (250 milliliters) whole milk warmed to 110°F (43°C)
• 4 1/4 teaspoons (16 grams or 2 packets) active dry yeast
• 6-6 1/2 cups (780-845 grams) bread flour separated
• 1 cup (226 grams) unsalted butter room temperature (save the wrappers)
• 1/2 cup (115 grams) granulated sugar plus 1 tablespoon
• 3 large eggs room temperature
• 1/2 teaspoon (3 grams) kosher salt
• 1 teaspoon (3 grams) ground cardamom optional

Cinnamon-Sugar Filling

• 1 cup (210 grams) brown sugar
• 1/2 cup (113 grams) unsalted butter room temperature
• 1 tablespoon (6 grams) ground cinnamon

Cream Cheese Filling

• 8 ounces (226 grams) cream cheese room temperature
• 1/4 cup (50 grams) sugar
• 1 teaspoon lemon zest from 1/2 a large lemon
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Egg Wash

• 1 egg yolk
• 1 tablespoon water

Vanilla Glaze

• 3 cups powdered sugar sifted
• 3 tablespoons (62 grams) light corn syrup or honey
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• hot water as needed to thin

Optional Garnishes

• sprinkles
• colored sanding sugar
• chocolate shavings
• plastic baby or dried bean

Instructions

Mix the Sponge

• In a mixing bowl, combine the warm milk, yeast, 2 cups of the bread flour, and the tablespoon of sugar. Stir the sponge with a rubber spatula until it forms a thick paste. Cover the bowl with a clean kitchen towel or a piece of plastic wrap.
• Place the bowl in a warm, draft-free area in the kitchen for 30 minutes. The sponge will begin fermenting and rising during this period. After 30 minutes, you can continue with the making of the bread or transfer the starter to a jar and refrigerate it for 24 hours*.

Make the Bread Dough

• Add the remaining sugar and the butter to the bowl of your stand mixer (fitted with the paddle attachment) or to a large mixing bowl if you’re using an electric hand mixer. Cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy, or for 6-7 minutes. Scrape down the bowl and the paddle twice during the creaming process to ensure the mixture is creamed evenly. 
• Add all of the eggs to the bowl and blend them into the sugar-butter mixture for 4 minutes at low speed. The mixture will resemble curdled cream at this point. Add all of the room temperature sponge to the bowl. 
• Blend the sponge into the egg-butter mixture until the mixture looks smooth and thick, like pancake batter. Switch to your mixer’s dough hook and add the ground cardamom and 3 cups of the bread flour to the bowl. Or, if you’re kneading by hand, place the 3 cups of flour onto a clean countertop and scrape the dough mixture into the center of the flour.
• Knead the dough on second speed (or with your hands) for 2 minutes. Gradually add the remaining cup-cup and a half of bread flour as needed. Humidity will determine if you use all, some, or more than the remaining quantity of flour. If the dough is super-sticky, you need to add more flour. If you are kneading the dough in the mixer, pay attention to how it is behaving at the bottom of the bowl. A dough that is too wet will cling to the bottom of the bowl instead of wrapping itself around the dough hook. If yours is doing that, add more flour. On the other hand, if the dough looks dry or really stiff, sprinkle a tablespoon of water in there to moisten it. It’s better to add too little flour than to overdo it and try to bring it back, so be conservative. Knead the dough for a total of 10 minutes. When finished, the dough will feel supple, soft, and feel like it wants to stick to your hands but won’t when you release it.

Allow the Dough to Rise

• Once the dough is mixed, remove it from the bowl. Grease the bowl using the butter wrappers you saved earlier. Return the dough to the bowl and flip it over. This step oils the surface of the dough and helps prevent skin from forming on its surface. Cover the bowl with a clean towel and allow the dough to rise in a warm, draft-free area of your kitchen for 1 hour.

Retard the Dough for Easier Handling (Optional)

• After the dough has doubled in size, punch down the dough. To retard the dough (see details in post), cover the bowl with plastic wrap and place the bowl in the refrigerator. Chill the dough for 3 hours or overnight to make it firm, and therefore easier, to handle.

Prepare the Cinnamon-Sugar Filling (while the dough is rising or up to a week ahead)

• In a small mixing bowl and using a hand mixer, beat the brown sugar, butter, and cinnamon together on medium-high speed until light and fluffy or 3-4 minutes. If you’re assembling the king cake right after it rises, just leave the cinnamon-sugar filling on the countertop. You can also cover the bowl and store the cinnamon-sugar mixture in the fridge for up to a week. It will need to come to room temperature before spreading.

Prepare the Cream Cheese Filling (up to a week ahead)

• Add the cream cheese, sugar, lemon zest, and vanilla extract to a mixing bowl. Blend the ingredients together on med-low speed until smooth. Keep the cream cheese filling on the countertop if you’re assembling the king cake right away. If not, cover and refrigerate for a week. Remember to allow it time to soften before spreading. 

Assemble the King Cake

• If you have retarded your dough: allow it to warm to slightly colder than room temperature on the countertop. Taking the chill off of it will help it roll out easier. Use a knife or bench scraper to divide the dough into two equal pieces. Using a rolling pin, roll the dough out on a lightly floured surface. A rectangle that measures 26-inches by 16-inches is ideal.
• Spread a thin layer of the cinnamon-sugar mixture onto the dough’s surface, leaving a one-inch margin on one of the long sides. Loosely roll the dough, beginning on the covered side, towards the side that has the uncovered margin. Once the log is rolled, pinch the dough’s edge to its body of it to seal it. Roll the log between your hands and the counter to stretch it out to about thirty inches. Now, roll the log so the seam is on the bottom and set it out of the way so you can roll the cream cheese log.
• Roll out the second piece of dough to the same specs as the first. Spread the cream cheese filling evenly on top, but this time, leave a 1-inch margin on one long end and 1 1/2-inch margins on both of the short ends. Roll, pinch, and stretch the same way you did with the first roll. This one will feel softer. Pinch the ends of the cream cheese log to prevent the filling from oozing out.
• Place the two dough logs perpendicular to one another on a silicone baking mat or a sheet of parchment paper. Pinch together the ends of the two rolls to join them. Carefully twist the two rolls of dough together until you get to the opposite ends. Form the twisted rope into a wreath and transfer the mat or paper it’s on to a sheet pan, overlapping the ends.
• Cover the wreath with a clean kitchen towel and allow it to rise for thirty minutes in a warm area of your kitchen. In the meantime, begin heating your oven to 350°F (177°C).

Make the Egg Wash

• Whisk together the egg yolk and water in a small mixing bowl. After the dough has risen, brush egg wash where the ends meet and pinch them together to seal the ring. Brush the rest of the dough with the egg wash.

Bake the King Cake

• Bake the loaf for 30 minutes or until the bread is golden brown and sounds hollow when tapped. You may have to rotate your pan halfway through baking to ensure it browns evenly.

Make the Vanilla Glaze (up to two days ahead)

• In a mixing bowl, combine the powdered sugar, corn syrup (or honey), and vanilla extract. Add enough hot water to thin the glaze to your desired consistency. You can make the glaze a few days in advance and store it, covered, at room temperature. If your glaze thickens too much, nuke it in the microwave for 30 seconds. Give it a stir, and it should be fluid. If not, just stir in a few drops of hot water.

Finish the King Cake

• Once the king cake is baked, remove the pan from the oven and allow the bread to cool completely. Spoon the glaze onto the surface of the king cake.
• Decorate with a generous amount of colored sanding sugar or sprinkles. You can also tint the glaze the Mardi Gras colors with gel food color and decorate it that way!
• Serve and enjoy your king cake!

Notes

*If you decide to chill the sponge, allow it to come to room temperature for 30 minutes before using it in the king cake dough. Double your filling of choice if you would only like to fill your King Cake with one filling instead of the two listed here. If you want to include a baby, nestle it into the baked and cooled the cake before glazing and decorating. You can just put it under the loaf somewhere, too.

Storage Instructions:

1. Wrap leftover king cake tightly in plastic wrap or transfer it to a sealed food storage container. 
2. Store at room temperature. Avoid storing the king cake in the fridge because the cold air will make it go stale faster.
3. King cake tastes best within 3 days of baking.
4. Reheat leftover slices in the microwave for 15 seconds to give them a just-baked flavor.

Freezer Instructions:

1. Freeze the king cake before frosting it.
2. Allow the cake to cool completely.
3. Wrap the cake in a double layer of plastic wrap, followed by a layer of heavy-duty aluminum foil.
4. Freeze the cake for up to 2 months.
5. Thaw the frozen king cake at room temperature, before frosting and decorating as desired. 

Our Experience

We made a few substitutions on this recipe. We used a mixture of flours. We didn’t use any bread flour but mixed 4 cups all purpose flour, 2 cups whole wheat flour, and 1/2 cup white whole wheat flour (it was all supposed to be white whole wheat but I grabbed the wrong bag…in my defense, they looked the same). We used a mixture of Swerve and regular sugar in the dough because the yeast needed something to eat. Swerve brown sugar for the cinnamon filling; Stevia, Swerve, and Splenda for the cream cheese filling; and a 1:1 mixture of powdered sugar and Swerve confectioners sugar for the glaze. The cream cheese was the 1/3 less fat version and the whole milk was almond milk with about 1/8 cup of whipping cream.

The recipe started with making the “sponge” which was a little different from our dough of last week. It was thick like a dough and had to be mixed in with the other wet ingredients after it had risen a bit.

I’ll apologize right now, we didn’t do a very good job of getting pictures this week. Sometimes we just get busy and forget to take them. The sponge doubled in size and was pretty thick before we added it to the wet ingredients. The wet ingredients were all added together and they looked like curdled milk before the sponge was added.

Good thing we have the KitchenAid, otherwise, mixing the sponge in with the wet ingredients would have been a chore. The dough at this stage was more like a pancake batter. We used the paddle attachment up to this point. I used a spatula and mixed the flour in by hand and then switched to the dough hook once that was all done.

When the flour was added, we kneaded it with the dough hook for 10 minutes and it was ready for proofing for an hour. We had luck using the warming drawer last week, so, we decided to use it again this week. The bowl was half full so we thought once it doubled in size the it would be pretty full and we considered a larger bowl. The dough more than doubled and we had to man handle it just to get it out of the warming drawer.

So, the warming drawer worked…maybe too well. We didn’t get a picture of how much it grew, but we punched it down and it went back down to its original size. We placed it in the refrigerator because we were heading out to eat.

When we got home from our meal, we took the bowl out of the refrigerator and it had doubled again! So, we punched it down again, divided in in two and began rolling it out.

We went out of order and started with the cream cheese roll first. We heated the filling up a little bit in the microwave because we didn’t want to have trouble spreading it like we had the previous week.

We rolled the dough in a pretty large rectangle that was fairly thin. Once the filling was spread on, we rolled it up, starting on the long edge, like a cinnamon roll. We pinched the seem together when it was rolled up.

The cinnamon filling was warmed up too. Aubrey thought it was too warm but it spread really well and I didn’t think it would make any difference in the finished product.

We rolled the second half of the dough into the same sized rectangle, spread the filling on it, and rolled it up sealing the edge when done.

Each section of dough looked the same once they were rolled up except the cream cheese section was slightly thicker than the cinnamon one. The cinnamon one was also pretty thin in some places. (We weighed the dough so it wasn’t because one had more dough than the other.)

Once we had the two “logs”, we twisted them and shaped them into a ring. Then, as directed, we let it rise one more time. That’s were it went crazy!! Again, we didn’t get a picture of it before putting it in the oven but it got huge and had blow outs even before we started baking! In the middle of the baking, the cinnamon filling was dripping on the oven floor and smoking us out. Setting off the smoke detector in the process. My brother, Butch, was visiting and he probably thought our king cake was a catastrophe in the making. We pressed on!

We managed to get it all baked and took it off the cookie sheet because a few inches of it were hanging off of it already! We glazed it by drizzling it because, again, we don’t like big chunks of glaze at our house. Then, we sprinkled it with colored sugar. (1/2 cup sugar mixed with several drops of food coloring to get the color you want.)

When we were looking online at various king cakes, we always thought they looked messy and a little rough. We decided that ours fit right in! Also, I am still trying to figure out how other people’s glazes stay so white with brown vanilla in them!? Maybe I am going to have to buy a vanilla bean to make my own vanilla sugar. I would have put more colored sugar on it but Aubrey said she didn’t like the sugar because it’s crunchy so I put a limited amount on it.

The cake was HUGE! It was about 18″ in diameter. Maybe it was supposed to be that big but we doubted it. We let it rise a little too much. You can see the gaps in the sliced pieces due to the over proofing.

Paul Hollywood might have told us it was “raw” in a few places but we had no issues with pushing the dough in and not having it bounce back. Not saying it didn’t do that, just that we didn’t have a problem eating it.

What we liked.

Despite its rough appearance, it was one of my favorites. It smelled like a cinnamon roll so who doesn’t love that. The bread was moist and lighter than I expected it to be. I don’t know what cardamom tastes like and not sure if it made a difference in this recipe but, I didn’t taste anything odd so it wasn’t something I would suggest taking out. The cheese filling was pretty subtle, not like in a cheese Danish. The cinnamon filling was just as I would have expected it while one of our taste testers thought it could have been stronger…she also asked about lemon in the cream cheese filling. I didn’t taste it. Overall, it was delicious. It received 5 out of 5 thumbs up and we think it’s a keeper.

What we would change.

Obviously, we would let it rise a little less. The two different fillings was a little odd too. It was like having two different desserts in one. If that sounds appealing to you, this is perfect. We thought it would have been nice to have both flavors in one bite. Our ideas to fix it went from mixing the two fillings to making the “logs” smaller and then make two small loaves instead of one large one. We will continue thinking on it. I mentioned making the cake like a babka and it wasn’t immediately shot down so, that too, might be a future option.

What we learned.

We learned that we need to watch our yeast breads a little bit closer (rather than just accepting the time listed on the recipe). We had just made an enriched dough so we knew how to do it, however, the “sponge” was a new method for adding the yeast that we hadn’t done before. We also learned how to make a twisted wreath out of dough…sort of (we didn’t master it).

The king cake may be a new Mardi Gras tradition at our home!

Until next week, Happy Baking!