Louisiana’s Mardi Gras season has kicked off with traditional masses and the northwest region’s first parade is next week. This means it’s also the season of the king cake – the decadent yearly indulgence of flour, sugar and butter.
Most bakeries have been behind the scenes, stocking up and preparing for the booming baking season in Louisiana.
Here’s what they’ve been up to and what bakers have planned for this year:
Lilah’s Bakery
Address:1718 Centenary Blvd, Shreveport, LA 71101
Phone: 318-676-1407
Price: Starting at $16.99
Early preparation comes with little sleep. Sopan Tike starts baking at 6 a.m. and is home past midnight most days during the season.Husband and wife owners Sopan and Lisa Tike have been hard at work preparing for king cake season since November.
“There are even some days he sleeps in our van,” Lisa Tike said.
Sopan Tike can make up to 70 king cakes per batch at the peak of the season, and “we’re making five to seven batches every day,” he said.
Lisa Tike said year-round she and her husband operate the bakery by themselves but for Mardi Gras and king cake season they hire six to eight additional employees.
The Tikes’ secret to great king cakes: fresh everyday, and never frozen.
“Sometimes, during our busiest time of the season customers may get a king cake that is still warm because we bake them all day,” Lisa Tike said.
Lilah’s offers king cakes in four sizes ranging from mini to extra-large. The bakery offers 25 varieties.
Tubbs Hardware
Address:615 Benton Rd, Bossier City, LA 71111
Phone:318-746-0311
Price: $23.99
Don Tubbs, Tubbs Hardware owner, has been selling Caddo-Bossier Mardi Gras for the past 25 years..
“We have our X-Treme King Cakes available the week before Christmas,” said Tubbs. “The reason being that we have so many tourist come in to visit family and they want to take a king cake home with them or have one for New Year’s or have one prior to the Epiphany. I try to accommodate them by having them available early.”
Tubbs Hardware cakes number 10,000 in five flavors each year. He starts buying ingredients in September.
“Almost everything in the king cake is a commodity. Going to the grocery store is not going to cut it,” he said.
Tubbs commissions a bakery to make his “X-Treme King Cakes” using his own recipe he created years ago.
“We are continuously making king cakes throughout the season but my recipe is special,” said Tubbs. “To meet the demands for people requesting king cakes, I met with some baking experts and came up with recipe that you have to freeze. My king cakes have products inside of it that need to be frozen; and thawing the cake is a part of the recipe. It’s why my cakes are so moist and delicious.”
For Tubbs, king cakes are the best part of Mardi Gras season. “It brings everyone together and we keep it family and keep it Christian, and that’s what the king cake is all about,” he said.
Of five flavors, best seller: cream cheese.
Julie Anne’s Bakery & Café
Address:825 Kings Hwy, Shreveport, LA 71104
Phone: 318-424-4995
Price: Starting at $16.99
Julie Anne’s Bakery has been serving Caddo-Bossier and making king cakes since 1991.
“Preparation for king cake season starts before Christmas,” said veteran Julie Anne’s Bakery and Café employee Merry Elen Sewell. “The owners of Julie Anne’s, husband and wife Renato and Anela Majstorovic, stock pile some ingredients early and make sure we have all of our ingredients before we leave for our three-day Christmas break. That is the most important part of our preparation.”
Sewell has worked for Julie Anne’s on and off since 1998 and she is no stranger to the hard work that comes with preparing for king cake season.
“We bake our first king cake the day we get back from celebrating Christmas and continue to bake them fresh every day,” said Sewell.
Though the bakery closes its doors Sundays, staff are known to work seven days a week at 14-hour shifts to meet the season’s demand.
“The ovens run 24/7 at the peak of the season,” said Sewell. Owners’ family members come in to help fold king cake boxes. Extra help is brought in to help make dough.
“I’ve only work a couple for king cake seasons; the first one was a blur to me because we’re moving so fast,” said Julie Anne’s employee Mary Tucker. “We have to take down tables to make room for our shipping orders, its impressive all that we do.”
Julie Anne’s offers over 20 flavors with their best seller being pralines and cream.
The bakery can sell up to 100 cakes per day.
A Stone’s Throw Café and Catering
Address:1550 Airport Dr, Shreveport, LA 71107
Phone:318-221-8544
Price: $15
Rachel Ginsburg’s A Stone’s Throw Café has been giving Caddo-Bossier home-cooked Southern style breakfast and lunch for the past 10 years.
A Stone’s Throw Café offers 11 king cake flavors but Ginsburg says anything you can think of as a donut, she can make into a king cake.
“I put in 13 to 15 hour days,” said Ginsburg. “I come in at 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. in the morning to get everything going to make sure I’m done by the time I open up for breakfast.”
Ginsburg says she stock piles sugar and buys other king cake ingredients on a weekly basis.
A smaller bakery, she makes two to three cakes a day, but they’re as fresh as they could be.
Best selling flavors: lemon and cream cheese.
Lemon and cream cheese are A Stone’s Throw Café’s best sellers.
Southern Maid Donuts
Address:1409 E 70th Dr, Shreveport, LA 71105
Phone:318-524-3900
Price: $26
A true staple of Caddo-Bossier, Southern Maid Donut’s on East 70th Street has been making king cake for the past eight years.
“We make our king cakes fresh every morning,” said owner Gill McElroy. “It started out slow but every year we get bigger and bigger. We offer one size and five flavors.”
McElroy said one of his employees is working through the night and into the next shift to accommodate king cake season. Others are putting in overtime.
“I’m basically here when everyone’s asleep and when they wake up,” said employee Skyla Strong.
McElroy has been stock piling cream cheese since December so that he can meet the needs of his customers during king cake season.
Southern Maid Donuts has been making king cakes since Christmas. “We make king cakes by order and bake an additional 10-50 extra for walk-ins during the peak of the season,” said McElroy.
Numbers
Caddo-Bossier’s sweet tooth calls for massive amounts of ingredients to produce the Mardi Gras staple known as king cake.
Lilah’s Bakery, Julie Anne’s Bakery, Tubbs Hardware, A Stone’s Throw Café and Southern Maid Donuts will acquire colossal quantities of supplies and it all starts with sugar.
Collectively, the bakeries are predicting to use these ingredients per day: 750 pounds of powdered sugar, 300 pounds of granulated sugar, 350 pounds of sweet dough, 120 pounds of yeast, five crates of eggs and 6 one-gallon cartons of milk.
The bakeries also predict they will use 80 gallons of vanilla flavoring, 4,803 packages of cream cheese, and 4,000 pounds of colored sugar this king cake season.
For packaging, they’ll use 33,000 boxes, eight cases of doubloons, 50,000 beads and 28,000 babies. They’ll collectively make close to 32,700 cakes.
These five local bakeries are expecting to make about 1,000 king cakes a day at the start of the season and ship out about 500 a day.
Easy King Cake recipe:
Prep time: 15 minutes
Cook time: 50 minutes
Ready in: 1 hour 5 minutes
Ingredients
- 3 (14 ounce) cans refrigerated sweet roll dough
- 2 (12 fluid ounce) cans creamy vanilla ready-to-spread frosting
- 1/4 cup milk
- 2 drops green food coloring
- 2 drops yellow food coloring
- 1 drop red food coloring
- 1 drop blue food coloring
- 1/2 cup multi-colored sprinkles
Directions
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease a baking sheet.
- Open the cans of sweet roll dough and unroll the dough from each can into 3 strands. Working on a clean surface, place 3 dough strands side by side and gather them together to make one large strand. Fold this in half, and roll slightly to make a fat log. Repeat steps with the remaining dough. Place each log on the prepared baking sheet and shape to make a ring, overlapping the ends and pinching them together to make a complete circle. Pat the dough into shape as necessary to make the ring even in size all the way around. Cover loosely with foil.
- Bake in preheated oven until firm to the touch and golden brown, 50 to 60 minutes. Check often for doneness so the ring doesn't overbake. Place on a wire rack and cool completely.
- Place the cake ring on a serving plate. Cut a slit along the inside of the ring and insert a small plastic baby, pushing it far enough into the cake to be hidden from view.
- Divide the frosting evenly between 4 bowls. Stir 1 tablespoon of milk into each bowl to thin the frosting. Use the frosting in one bowl to drizzle over the cooled cake. To the remaining three bowls of frosting, stir yellow food coloring into one and green into another. Stir the red and blue food colorings together with the frosting in a third bowl to make purple frosting. Drizzle the cake with yellow, green, and purple frostings in any desired pattern. Dust the cake with multi-colored sprinkles and decorate with beads, additional plastic babies, curly ribbon, and other festive trinkets.
Traditional King Cake recipe
Prep time: 1 hour
Cook time: 30 minutes
Ready in: 4 hours 30 minutes
Ingredients
PASTRY:
- 1 cup milk
- 1/4 cup butter
- 2 (.25 ounce) packages active dry yeast
- 2/3 cup warm water (110 degrees F/45 degrees C)
- 1/2 cup white sugar
- 2 eggs
- 1 1/2 teaspoons salt
- 1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
- 5 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
FILLING:
- 1 cup packed brown sugar
- 1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
- 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
- 1/2 cup melted butter
FROSTING:
- 1 cup confectioners' sugar
- 1 tablespoon water
Directions
- Scald milk, remove from heat and stir in 1/4 cup of butter. Allow mixture to cool to room temperature. In a large bowl, dissolve yeast in the warm water with 1 tablespoon of the white sugar. Let stand until creamy, about 10 minutes.
- When yeast mixture is bubbling, add the cooled milk mixture. Whisk in the eggs. Stir in the remaining white sugar, salt and nutmeg. Beat the flour into the milk/egg mixture 1 cup at a time. When the dough has pulled together, turn it out onto a lightly floured surface and knead until smooth and elastic, about 8 to 10 minutes.
- Lightly oil a large bowl, place the dough in the bowl and turn to coat with oil. Cover with a damp cloth or plastic wrap and let rise in a warm place until doubled in volume, about 2 hours. When risen, punch down and divide dough in half.
- Preheat oven to 375 degrees F (190 degrees C). Grease 2 cookie sheets or line with parchment paper.
- To Make Filling: Combine the brown sugar, ground cinnamon and 1/2 cup flour. Pour 1/2 cup melted butter over the cinnamon mixture and mix until crumbly.
- Roll dough halves out into large rectangles (approximately 10x16 inches or so). Sprinkle the filling evenly over the dough and roll up each half tightly like a jelly roll, beginning at the wide side. Bring the ends of each roll together to form 2 oval shaped rings. Place each ring on a prepared cookie sheet. With scissors make cuts 1/3 of the way through the rings at 1 inch intervals. Let rise in a warm spot until doubled in size, about 45 minutes.
- Bake in preheated oven for 30 minutes. Push the doll into the bottom of the cake. Frost while warm with the confectioners' sugar blended with 1 to 2 tablespoons of water.
