Cakes for kings

Goodbye Christmas, hello Carnival

Mardi Gras/carnival season starts tomorrow. 

I’m not sure how relevant that is outside of New Orleans. Basel’s carnival, Fasnacht, is the largest in Switzerland and is on the UNESCO List of Intangible Cultural Heritage. There are many Fasnacht-focused newsletters coming. What’s relevant now is that January 6th, aka Epiphany, aka Three Kings is the start of carnival season (at least in New Orleans), which means king cake. 

I love New Orleans-style king cake and started baking my own in 2015. New Orleans king cake involves a yeasted dough with a cinnamon filling and some kind of frosting. There are variations — a quick search of what New Orleans bakeries are selling includes gooey butter king cake, one stuffed with strawberries, and a chocolate filled one. Store-bought cakes come with a plastic baby, and the person who gets the baby has to bring the next king cake. I used this recipe for years and have also tried this one. 

The best-looking king cakes I’ve made

I also made a French king cake once, a galette des rois, which is puff pastry filled with almond paste. Based on recent visits to French pastry shops, there are variations on this too, like puff pastry filled with pistachio or chocolate.

Switzerland also has a king cake, or a Three Kings cake: Dreikönigskuchen. Unlike New Orleans king cake, which you eat throughout carnival season (or at least, I ate throughout the one season I lived there), Dreikönigskuchen seems to be associated with just January 6¹. Like New Orleans king cake and galette des rois, the Swiss three kings cake includes the choking hazard of a plastic figure (or an almond for home bakers). Apparently it’s a small plastic king, and the person who gets it is “king for a day” and gets to wear a crown. 

Dreikönigskuchen from Coop. Not pictured: the cardboard crown that came with it

After looking at several different recipes, it seems the Swiss three kings cake is just Grättima dough shaped into buns and arranged like a flower. It’s also very similar to the dough for the bread called Zopf, which many use to make their Grättima. Betty Bossi, who’s like the Swiss Betty Crocker, has a Zopf-like recipe for Dreikönigskuchen with more sugar. It includes lemon, raisins, and sugar sprinkles or slivered almonds on top. The recipe base is almost the same as their Grättima recipe. 

Dreikönigskuchen made me question my understanding of cake and Kuchen. This “cake” looks like bread. Is Kuchen not cake? 

My go-to source for Swiss food, Andie at Helvetic Kitchen, covers this in a post about an apple cider “cake” that looks like a pie. She polled her Swiss friends, and per her sources, Kuchen is more homogenous and also rectangular, versus Torte, which refers to fancy cakes that require assembling different parts, like cake layers and filling. There are, of course, regional variations and exceptions, like this three kings cake, which is homogenous (all one dough) but not rectangular. And it’s bread. 

I guess New Orleans king cake is also not cake cake, but more of a coffee cake, or what you might get if you made cinnamon rolls but never cut them into rolls. 

I wonder what other shapes the Grättima dough will take throughout the year.

Do you have a favorite king(s) cake/galette de rois/Dreikönigskuchen recipe or purveyor?

Today in Swiss German

Chueche or Chuechli - cake or little cake. I can’t think of how to write out the phonetics for this, so here’s a recording of me saying it.

1.  This is where, in writing this post, I remembered that post-2021, January 6 has a totally different connotation for Americans. I am very focused on king cake.