Lise and Jenna make King Cake (me too)

My two favorite food bloggers, Lise from Mom Loves Baking and Jenna from The Painted Apron recently featured easy-to-make King Cakes using canned cinnamon rolls. Although I’ve had really good bakery-made King Cakes, they are usually a coffee-cake style, which to me is rather dry. The grocery store variety isn’t anything to rave about either, so I became very interested in this quick (cheater) method.

Lise (who is actually a college sorority sister of mine — more on that another day), kept her cinnamon rolls whole and arranged them in a ring, standing on their edges on a flat tray, while Jenna (who I met at a blogger’s meeting several years ago and lives part-time in Orange Beach) rolled the dough into smaller pieces and arranged them in a bundt cake pan, a-la monkey bread style. Both cakes looked AMAZING! (so I got hungry for King Cake).

I decided to do my own thing, while totally ripping them both off! Hahaha! (evil kitchen laugh).

I was a rebel and used both pre-packaged cinnamon rolls and regular biscuits (we alway called them “whop” biscuits, because you “whop” them on the edge of the counter to get the tube to pop open, but early in my marriage, my Italian husband flipped out because he thought I was saying, “WOP” which was a slur, (with-out- papers) that I had never heard in my life — we didn’t call people names in my family — but to keep the peace, I now just use the refined (boring) term, “canned”). Political correctness has hit my house at last.

Alternating the small pieces, I arranged them around the edge of a large (10×2) cake pan. I used two short cans of biscuits and one large can of cinnamon rolls.

I wanted really vivid colors, so I used Wilton food colorings in

Purple=Justice,

Green=Faith, and

Gold=Power.

A basic powdered sugar/water mixture was all I used to make a thick, but not too thick icing that I could drizzle over the top.

And as luck would have it, I’d just returned from Toomey’s Mardi Gras Store in Mobile, where they only sell plastic King Cake babies by the bag. It was just over $3 for 4 dozen!!! I figure I’ll be baking King Cakes long after I’m in the nursing home if I use one a year! Since Lise and Jenna shared their ideas with me, I think I’ll share my babies with them.

You poke the baby inside the cake from the bottom, and whoever receives the slice with the baby (representing the Christ Child) traditionally has to host the next party.

This “cake” turned out moist and sweet, but not too sweet, thanks to the regular biscuits being added. After I finished the cake, we attended a parade, and when my college son and friends came in later, they ate most of it. And guess who got the baby? My own son . . . so it looks like I need to fire up the oven again!