Time Period: 1963-1979
Why is there a recipe for "French King Cake" in a book called American Cake? I don't know, ask Anne Byrn. Though this cake did originate in France, it's apparently become the King Cake of choice for home bakers in New Orleans, rather than the brightly-colored brioche cakes you see in most bakeries, though both are traditionally served on Epiphany.
Also known as Galette des Rois or Frangipane King Cake, this version is made with sheets of puff pastry, which are sealed around a square of almond-heavy cake batter. While making puff pastry from scratch would have been a nightmare not that long ago, the fact that you can buy it out of the freezer case at the grocery store now goes a long way to understanding how this one took over in home kitchen popularity.
I found it to also be very tasty, and honestly more flavorful than the other version of King Cake, which wasn't bad, but on the dry side, which this cake managed to avoid by incorporating the soft batter into the center. If there was one textural problem to this cake, it was the puff pastry itself. Know what puff pastry is? Flaky! That's a good thing, but when 80% of your cake is a double layer of it, it explodes into crumbs the second you press a knife to it.
That aside, I did enjoy this chapter of the project, and as long as you've got a broom handy to clean up after you slice it, it would be worth having again.
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