Mini King Cakes

Thankful for something to do, I was excited about a baking order this week for a friend. She wanted something Mardi Gras themed, so I thought it would be fun to make mini king cakes in cupcake tins. They weren't too tough, and I experimented with coloring as much as I could. I'm pretty happy with the results!

Mini King Cakes

I remember king cake vaguely from my childhood, someone my dad worked with had a wife that baked them every year. I really only remember them to be sugary goodness. So I set out recipe searching and saw Emeril has a recipe on the Food Network. Emeril IS New Orleans, so I figured his would be as good as any. I followed his recipe pretty closely. I omitted the citron in the dough, I don't keep that on hand. Check out his recipe and come back to me after your first dough rise:)

I wanted to make these colorful, so once I passed the first rise, I rolled out the dough into a log and cut it in thirds. I set one aside to leave as is, and put food coloring on the other two (green and purple). For the green, I only had liquid dye and it worked fine. For the purple, I had gel, which typically I prefer, but for this recipe, stick to liquid. The gel didn't spread well and made the dough sticky again. Truthfully, neither had the effect I was looking for, I really wanted the dough to be solid colors.

Once I had the color in as good as it was going to get. I separated each into 12 balls, maybe golf ball sized. This almost perfectly made a dozen. I had a very small taster left over:) Next, I rolled one ball in each color into a snake.

Now braid the three colors together.

And round the ends together into a ring.

You don't need to pinch it together, just put them seem side down in cupcake liners.

I let them do their second rise in the muffin tins and then baked them at 350 for about 15 minutes.

Then for the best part, the glaze and sugar! I put the glaze in a shallow bowl and dipped the top of the cakes in and kept them held upside down until most of the dripping subsided. I sprinkled them liberally with yellow, green, and purple sugar. Done!

The lemon in the glaze is pretty strong, I enjoy lemon desserts, but I didn't remember that in the flavor profile of a king cake. These are yummy, but I'd be interested in knowing if that is traditional or if I happened upon a "bam"ed up version:)

UPDATE: I've researched more and talked to friends and family in New Orleans and this does NOT seem to be a traditional king cake, which I suspected. I'm going to try again this weekend and will post the updated recipe. Really seems like most traditional versions are more of a braided cinnamon roll....and no lemon flavors.