Southern Living Magazine's King Cake

The BEST KING CAKE! This was the best K.C. I've made.(teens agreed!) I make one every year. Best if eaten in 2 days. I paid special attention to the room temp. and the temp. of 1st four ingredients matched the water temp. on the yeast package (115-120 deg), not the recipe temp. Filling: Substitute half of the gran. sugar with lt. brown sugar and I added pecans. Can be sub. fruit filling. Also, I filled it differently. I rolled it out as suggested, and put filling across the center covering 50% of the dough then I folded the sides to the center and lightly pressed ends together and twisted the dough in the traditional method. To twist: grab the short edge(end) of the dough and turn(wind) about 3 times then wind the other end abt. 3 times in the reverse direction. Lift the dough near the center and lightly shake to move the twisted rings into position, trying to keep the center filling seam on the inside of twist. Bake on a pizza pan. Also, I use a butter cream or cream cheese frosting. Suggested frosting is very sweet and on top of that, you are pouring on sugar! Woo! I never cook the cake with the baby in it. I push it into the bottom of the cooked cake. Half recipe to make just one cake.

having lived in louisiana for 13 years, i was excited to finally make my own since i live in cincy and haven't found any i really like here. at first, i wasn't sure if i did a good job, but the more i ate it, the more delicious i realized it was. i made a few mistakes as a rookie - i took the advice of folding it together, then twisting it instead of jelly-rolling it and i didn't do it tight enough. so some parts were too fat and where it came together, too skinny. but otherwise, it looked authntic. i also split the sugar b/w white and brown and added some pecans as suggested. yummy. i will try the cream cheese filling next time. i also bought the icing but colored my own sugar. it was so easy, i just couldn't justify the expense of buying the colors premade. now if i can just figure out how to fill it with bavarian cream - my favorite king cake filling ever.

This recipe produces a king cake that compares very favorably with the many bakery versions I tasted while living in New Orleans. The icing/decorating instructions, however, are far fussier than what they do in the Big Easy. Usually, they put a thin layer of white icing just on the top, then sprinkle it with a little bit of colored sugar. I did this and ended up using less than half of the suggested icing and maybe 2 tsp. of each colored sugar.