Around the World, King Cake Inspires Community

From France’s galette des rois to the green, purple, and gold king cakes of New Orleans, there’s something sweet for everyone

During the months of January through March at Lagniappe Bakehouse in New Orleans, pastry chef Kaitlin Guerin is hard at work. It’s king cake season, a yearly culinary celebration that’s a cornerstone of the city’s colorful culture. Having trained in kitchens in Copenhagen and California, Guerin, a native New Orleanian, is known for her more experimental takes on the green, gold, and purple-sprinkled pastry: She’s offered a rosemary pecan praline king cake, a chocolate pecan praline with candy orange variation, and an interpretation of the French king cake, galette des rois. And while Guerin has become known for her inventive approach to pastry-making, it’s the king cake tradition, found in New Orleans and in other parts of the world, that’s become a part of some of the world’s most equally religious and revelrous celebrations.

“We all need something to remind us of why it’s important that we come together,” Guerin says. “The history of the cake is centered around community, and people coming together around sweet food is something I find beautiful.”

Community is a common ingredient in king cakes, a traditionally oval-shaped cake crowned with icing, fruits, and other sweet toppings. In the U.S., king cake is interwoven with Mardi Gras, a celebration marking the start of Lent, and, in New Orleans, distinguished by the colors green, gold, and purple. And while both have become all but synonymous with the city of New Orleans, the cake takes its origins from both Catholic and pagan traditions, and is associated with Twelfth Night or Three Kings Day, a celebration just after Christmas that marks the Epiphany — and the start of the sweet season. On January 6, religious and non-religious folks alike begin enjoying the cakes in countries like Portugal, France, the U.S., and Mexico, and will be able to find the cakes in bakeries, homes, schools, and community centers through Mardi Gras (also known as Fat Tuesday), a jubilant celebration preceding the holy Lenten season.

Randy Schmidt

“We call it Día de Los Reyes in Mexico, and it is bigger than Christmas,” says Pati Jinich of Three Kings Day, which globally, is the start of king cake season. The journalist and television host explained that rosca de reyes, which means king cake, are associated with the holiday throughout Latin America, and rather than the icing and sprinkled-laced cakes of the U.S., cakes in Mexico, where Jinich is from, often come studded with ingredients like raisins, caramelized fruits, and caramel.

“It is a unifying treat, no matter who you are, where you stand politically, where you live — north or south,” she says. “Everybody is eating rosca de reyes.”

Found in homes, bakeries, and even Mexican department stores (Jinich notes that El Palacio de Hierro is one of many that offers its own variety), the sugary accompaniments and fillings are determined by location and region. But throughout, the cakes are best enjoyed with loved ones, where everyone can get a slice with hopes of finding the plastic baby placed within the cake.

The origins of the plastic baby are murky, but the tradition across countries and time stands: Finding a small, typically ceramic or plastic figure inside the cake, indicates good luck. If you find it in your slice, you’re required to bring a cake to the next gathering.

“In the old days, it would have been a fève, which is the fava bean. A dry fava bean would have been put into the cake,” says Kate Hill, a France resident for more than 30 years who runs a writing retreat and culinary school in Agen. Whoever found the fava bean, Hill explains, would be crowned “the king” and would be required to bring the next cake to the next community gathering. The use of a bean transformed into a porcelain doll around the Middle Ages, and Hill says that these days, it’s typically a ceramic character. In the galette des rois, France’s version of the king cake, a puff pastry shell is traditionally filled with a type of almond cream; spices and flavors vary by region.

“There’s always that orange flower water flavoring in the king cake, which is one of the distinctive things of cakes of this part of Southwest France,” Hill says. In Provenance, bakers are known to prepare a brioche-style dough with candied fruit on top, similar to those found in Latin America.

Courtesy of Kate Hill

“There’s a rotational conviviality,” says Hill of the local tradition. “Your neighbors or your friends might say, ‘Oh, come over for cake.’ Not ‘come over for dinner,’ but ‘come over for cake.’ There’d maybe be a glass of champagne or sparkling wine. And that was very much your local gathering of your community: Not very many people, and just an extra [bit of] time past the holidays, a wrapping up of all those festivities before people are ready to get back to work.”

Back in New Orleans, Guerin is surrounded by traditional king cakes during the early months of each year and still finds ways to innovate. “We added West African, specifically Cameroonian, grains of paradise spice to the king cake,” she says of a recent reinterpretation. “The reason for adding it comes from the questions I find I ask myself: As I’m connecting the bridge between the natural ingredients here in Louisiana to the continent, how would my ancestors have approached this bread? What ingredients would they want to add and highlight?”

For Guerin, the king cake allows her to preserve tradition and answer new questions, and there’s perhaps no better place for these dualities to exist than New Orleans.

“The sense of coming together and having community in a place is so important,” she says. “I don’t think that I’ve found another city in the U.S. that has community like New Orleans does. King cake is just the quintessential example of that.”