King cakes kick off Carnival season

NEW ORLEANS (AP) - Even though he had the 20-mile ride from Kiln, Miss., to think about it, M.J. Ballaron still had not decided what flavor he wanted for his first king cake of the year.

"I have to go in and look," he said from the parking lot at Randazzo's Camellia City Bakery just outside of New Orleans. He was contemplating cakes with apple and cream-cheese fillings, as well as the traditional rings infused with cinnamon and dusted with purple, green and gold sugars.

The six-week season leading to Mardi Gras will produce hundreds of thousands of the cakes, each with a trinket, usually a plastic baby, inside.

Besides the traditional cinnamon brioche, flavors now include ideas even the most imaginative baker probably would not have dreamed of a generation ago - creations with chocolate chip, raspberry, lemon and strawberry fillings.

"People will find any reason to have a king cake," including birthdays and weddings, said Tricia Randazzo-Zomes of Randazzo's. "One woman just turned 75, so she had one in the shape of a seven and one in the shape of a five."

January 6 is traditionally Twelfth Night, or the Feast of the Epiphany, which marked the official start of Carnival and king cake season. By tradition, the cakes are consumed only through Mardi Gras, which falls on February 16 this year.

Carnival purists view consumption at any other time as a mortal sin.

At Aiavolasiti Bakery in Mandeville near the Mississippi border, the clamor started around Christmas, owner George Aiavolasiti said. So he made a Christmas king cake, shaped like a wreath and decorated in Christmas colors.

"We were trying to hold back a little bit and get through another holiday first," he said.

The demand shows no sign of abating. In fact, king cakes seem to create their own economic boom, what with the advent of overnight air-courier services that have spread New Orleans king cake culture from Portland, Ore., to Portland, Maine.

During the season, employees at Haydel's Bakery in Jefferson will put in as many as 30 hours extra each week to satisfy the demand, co-owner Dottie Haydel said.

The bakery's mail-order department might ship as many as 60,000 cakes out of state, she said.

At Antoine's Famous Cakes and Pastries in Gretna, the staff has more than doubled to handle demand, both for king cakes and the bakery's patented Queen Cake, a five-filling confection with icing instead of sugar on top.

And the number will go even higher, owner Greg Antoine said, until about 30 employees - five times the bakery's off-season staff - are pumping out the cakes 24 hours a day.

"It's used as a promotion for the city, so we always feel like we're doing our part to promote New Orleans," Haydel said. "Over the years, our oil industry goes up, goes down, we lose people, they come back, and a lot of people we've lost look for their New Orleans food."

In king cake protocol, whoever gets the baby - a representation of the baby Jesus, whom the Three Wise Men visited on Twelfth Night - buys the next cake.

This tradition dates from the Saturnalia, an early winter festival in Rome in which slaves partook of a cake with one fava bean, said food historian Patrick Dunne, the owner of Lucullus, a French Quarter store specializing in traditional culinary specialties.

"The slave who got the bean was king for the day. The whole idea was to turn everything upside down."

By the 13th Century, he said, "it was being celebrated with bals masques and, of course, because of the association of kingship, kings and nobility got identified with it."

The tradition became established in England and France and moved to colonial America.

"We have references to it in Virginia," he said. "As soon as they could bake something besides corn pone, they were probably making king cakes."

In New Orleans, the king cake tradition is almost as old as the city, Dunne said.

This year, Dunne said he has sworn off them because he is sticking to a diet on which he has already lost 65 pounds.

M.J. Ballaron has made no such vow.

"God only knows," he said when asked how many king cakes he'll buy and consume this season.