King cake season!
King cake season is here! Another Mardi Grad season has begun and today I have finally formalized my king cake recipe, which for the past three years has been pencil scratch ingredients with no directions on an oil soaked sheet of paper with a note from my grandmother on the back and the sticker off a Sunkist lemon on the front and various calculations from an earlier attempt at converting it to weight measurements scribbled all around it.

Today I sat down and looked at it and made it work. I have typed up a nice neat three page recipe with all the measurements in US standard cooking measurements and in weight by grams! (Weight by gram is a much more accurate way to measure flour and make bread.) I figured out the baker's percentages and figured out the hydration of the bread! I consolidated fillings and the icing onto one page, including cream cheese, chocolate ganache, and brown sugar with pecans. I also wrote out step-by-step directions!

I made one change, using water and powdered milk rather than milk, because I changed the recipe to use a poolish (preferment) and I don't want half a cup of milk sitting around for a few days. The new and improved recipe will be attempted this weekend for Sunday dinner at my parents house and if all goes as planned I'll make it available here. (Or I may just ask you to contact me by e-mail so I can send the nicely formatted file rather than making it work in HTML and the confines of my blog layout.


- posted by Nick @ 1/08/2009 05:44:00 PM | 0 comments