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mckenzie's
Not sure why the original McKenzie’s bakery went out of business, but I can guarantee you that it wasn’t because of their king cake recipe because it’s amazing. This is a simple brioche bread roll with colored sugar crystals. That’s it! But it is an amazing gustatory experience. The brioche is light and heavenly and the topping is just sweet enough. If you don’t require all the fancy fillings that the kids are getting into these days, the McKenzie’s cake is quite possibly your best bet. You can find these delicious treats at Tastee’s Donuts locations during Carnival season.
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| 2. |
rouse's
Rouse’s is a good local grocer and they have a fine standard cake. It’s a dense, cinnamonny cake with sugar sprinkles on icing. The genius part is that the ingredients list NO trans fats, which is rare for these cakes. They probably know that we would eat them very quickly and not need the preservative effects of fake fat. I think our small family destroyed this cake in under 24 hours.
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| 3. |
caluda's
This is the beneficiary of the original Randazzo’s recipe evidently and was clearly the winner in the split. This is a delicious standard cake with full cinnamon flavor and a good ratio of icing to cake (you won’t get diabetes with one bite of this). This is probably what Rouse’s was trying to emulate except Rouse’s did Caluda’s one better by using butter instead of partially-hydrogenated nastiness.
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| 7. |
whole foods
Sure if you get king cake from Whole Foods, there’s a high probability that it will be coming from Austin, TX, but I moved here from Austin, so I wasn’t scrrd. The king cake is what you would expect from WF: tasty, healthy (as far as cake goes), and expensive. They don’t call it whole paycheck for nothin’! I love the use of butter in the cake instead of trans fats and they limit the icing, which is another plus. The consistency of this “cake” is more like bread, however, and it’s not the ideal version.
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| 8. |
randazzo's
Evidently there was a messy divorce in the King Cake Dynasty of Randazzo’s and the rumor is that this outfit got to keep the name and the other party got to keep the recipe. The other party won in that trade off because Randazzo’s king cake is not good. It’s light and cakey with very subtle cinnamon making room for the slight arsenic flavor which no doubt comes from the radioactive sprinkles. The icing is maybe what you’d expect from a 5-year-old in the kitchen: it tastes pretty much like a dense kid’s birthday cake.
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