King Cake: Denver

Whelp. I hate to start my post out with this admission: I didn’t really like my creation, this time around. I ventured off Nora’s beaten path and sought my own recipe, eventually settling on one which I found on Epicurious. The filling was a magical mix of pecans and bourbon found on this Food Network recipe.  I’m not sure if it was my chosen recipe, the altitude in Denver, or just my poor cooking that caused the downfall of this cake. Maybe it was a combination of the three.  It just came out very, very dry – more on this as we go along. However, I ate the filling with a spoon while I stuffed the cake The filing was very good.

I followed my recipe to the tee – however, even just as I mixed the flour mixture into the wet ingredients, it seemed too dry. I was concerned about this, as it didn’t seem moist enough to even rise, but I kept going because I’ve never made a King Cake before (or even eaten King Cake before).  Here my dough is, all mixed together.

Lo and Behold, it did rise, but not nearly as much as I thought it would:

It was still very dense at this point. Uh oh, I thought.  I punched it down and preheated my oven.  The dough still seemed dry. And tough. F***********, I thought.  Because I wanted my cake to be filled (and my Epicurious recipe just braided the dough), I made my filling (MMM) and rolled my dough into a blob rectangle.

In the filling went!

Then, I rolled my cake back up, like a jellyroll, and shaped it into a circle. Kind of. As you can tell, by this point, my cake seemed like a comedy of errors to me. So, I went with it. I cut some strips into the cake to vent/add some semblance of aesthetic quality, and into the oven it went.

While it baked, I got excited about using my Mardi Gras colored sugar, which I bought ultra-cheap at the grocery store. I have a ton of green, purple, and gold sanding sugar now, so even if this cake was a wash, I consider this a serious win.

I whipped up some powdered sugar/milk glaze and iced my cake. SANDING SUGAR!

Unfortunately, when we bit into it, the cake was ultra-dry. Like, cement-in-your-mouth, get-me-a-glass-of-milk dry.  Maybe it’s because I’m not Catholic. It looked (kind of) pretty, though.  At least there’s that.