Mardi Gras wouldn’t be the same withoutking cake, the ring-shaped dessert topped with colorful icings and sugars and trotted out in Mardi Gras colors. That's why I ordered as many king cakes as I could and had them delivered to my desk here in New York. (It's the next best thing to be in NOLA for Mardi Gras, I figured.)
My colleague Rhoda Boone, and I ate our way through the parade of cakes on Facebook Live, filling our entire office building floor with the smells of cinnamon dough and sugar. (Visitors from three floors up stopped by and wanted to know why we were suddenly covered in beads and feather boas—a legitimate concern.)
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Who did we include in our royal court? We tasted the big box producers, the old-school stalwarts, and the enterprising upstarts.Rouses, one ofthe best grocery stores in New Orleans, makes over 400,000 cakes every year, and the one we tried was ribboned throughout with a cinnamon swirl. We got our hands on cakes fromHaydel's BakeryandGambino's在小镇咕,受人尊敬的面包店d food is a given. Finally, wanting to taste the newest contender, we tried a cake byBywater Bakery,an up-and-coming spot that’s getting buzz for their custardy spin on the classic cake.
None of these cakes weredrasticallydifferent from each other, but there was one cake we clearly enjoyed more than the others: the delightfully old-school cakes from Gambino’s.
Joe Gambino opened his bakery’s doors in 1949 in and became a clutch cake option almost immediately. And now I know why: the King Cake's dough pulls apart like a cinnamon roll, and the flavor is expertly balanced between vanilla and cinnamon.
Gambino’s ships across the country, and you can order an undecorated cake to make pretty yourself (like we did in the video above). Too late to order for this year?You make a King Cake from scratch.
Just don't forget to tuck a plastic baby somewhere in the cake. Whoever finds a baby in their slice will, as legend goes, be blessed with good luck. That person is also responsible for buying next year's King Cake. I found the baby in my slice of Gambino's cake—I'll give you one guess who I'm getting my cake from next year.
