King Cake for Mardi Gras

Who doesn’t like celebrating holidays??

And when a holiday is on a day when a group of my friends is already getting together, well, that almost makes celebration mandatory.

My weekly Bible study is on Tuesday nights, so this year I thought it would be fun to celebrate Mardi Gras a little bit with a King Cake– even if you don’t really think of Mardi Gras as something for the religious (I mean, a holdiay known for people flashing for beads and wild drinking and carousing doesn’t really seem like something a church group would “celebrate”), but it has its roots firmly planted in the recognition of the Christian season of Lent.

For the King Cake, which is a traditional treat of the holiday, I used this recipe from Jules Gluten Free (so that everyone in my group could have some), except I used gluten-free Bisquick instead of Jules’ gluten-free flour.  …Sorry, Jules; I didn’t have time to order yours in.

This recipe called for an apple filling, which is part of the reason I chose it over some other gluten-free recipes.  Who doesn’t love apple filling??  It smelled soo good, and I didn’t think I’d totally messed up the yeast activation — a part of baking that I’ve never been wholly comfortable with.

The trickiest part of the recipe was rolling the dough up on itself with the filling inside.  My dough wasn’t terribly sticky, but it sure wanted to stick to the countertop more than itself!  I finally worked out this solution: use a thin cutting board to slide under the dough and lift it/roll it up onto itself.  Like so:

I finally had this roll ready, and even got it into a circle as directed in the recipe.  As it happened, though, I’d made a critical mistake — I should probably tried transferring the log to the baking sheet before forming it into said circle.  I tried to slide the cutting board under the cake to lift it up onto the baking sheet, but it started tearing and warping something fierce.  Luckily, the recipe called for me to make cuts through the outer layer to expose the filling, so I just counted some of those tears as natural “cuts”…  Whatever works, right?

Unfortunately, and you know that this isn’t the first time this has happened, I ran out of time to bake the roll before I had to leave for Bible study.  I called my friend Becca, our host, to have her preheat her oven so I could just bake it there.  It all seemed like things would work out after all, but with 20 minutes of bouncing in my car, the king cake flattened into something resembling a crumble-topped pancake.  *sigh*  I guess my plan didn’t work out as well as I’d hoped.

Still, the cake was really tasty, and everyone appreciated the dessert — even if they didn’t quite understand the concept of king cake, and I forgot to hide the traditional token in it.  Oh, well.

So, lesson learned: a yeast-risen, uncooked dough should not be transported, or it will fall down.  Although, come to think of it, our current study of the Old Testament should have taught me that on its own, as I seem to recall that the people of the exodus from Egypt had unleavened bread because they had to leave right away without letting the bread rise (and I can guess more importantly, bake).  We’ll just claim I made unleavened king cake for the Biblical reference, deal?  …And we’ll just totally disregard that those two things are from very different holidays!   ;)

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