We asked MS culinary students to pick the best king cake. Did they pick our bracket winner?
In a region with more than two dozen sources for a good king cake, how does one choose the best one?
So many choices, so little time.
As the season for flamboyance, revelry, and sweet, sweet pastry draws to a close, we asked a few of Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College’s pastry chefs in the making for their expert opinions.
Here’s what we learned.
What makes a good king cake?
“I think it’s personal,” said Chef Lori Pearce, instructor and advising coordinator at MGCCC. “I think people like it when it reminds them of their childhood. So, whatever they had when they were younger, they kind of gravitate towards.”
For Pearce, her childhood involved king cakes made from a very soft dough and chock full of traditional flavors like cream cheese, cinnamon sugar or berries.
“My dad had a restaurant and the manager of the restaurant one year sent us a king cake from Paul’s and it was like the most amazing, extravagant king cake I had ever seen at that point in time. I was just a little kid and I remember being like, ‘Oh my gosh, how did they do this?” Pearce said. “And so I started as a kid trying to recreate king cakes. That king cake became the king cake to replicate.”
Paul’s Pastry Shop in Picayune is still one of the go-to places for a good king cake on the coast.
But when Paul’s competed against 26 other bakeries in the Sun Herald’s best king cake bracket, it did not make it to the final round. That honor went to Beachside at Buoy’s in Bay St. Louis and Lolly & Pop’s Kitchen and Bakery in Hurley, with 85% of the final votes going to Lolly & Pop’s.
Would a blind taste test of culinary arts students studying the finer principles of baking come to the same conclusion?
We asked each bakery to share one of their most popular king cakes for the friendly competition.
Each bakery presented a king cake that routinely sold out this season, but were far from traditional cakes.
“I love that people are having fun with it,” Pearce said. “Anytime bakers are being creative, I just enjoy it.”
Beachside’s contender was a cannoli king cake filled with cannoli cream and chocolate. Lolly sent their turtle, a fancy confection of chocolate, caramel and pecans.
Cake vs filling
The pastry pro’s broke down their favorites based mostly on the consistency of the pastry dough and the flavor of the filling.
“I prefer the cannoli one,” said Morgan Crosby of Ocean Springs. “I liked the breading. It was like a puffed pastry.”
Talia Hopson preferred the consistency of the turtle king cake’s dough, but found the topping and filling to be extremely sweet, an opinion echoed by many of her classmates.
“It’s softer,” she said. “I think the bread helped to balance out the sweetness.”
Charles Brown enjoyed the king cake that broke the most rules to him, the turtle king cake. “It’s different, far from the traditional king cake and also tastes like it might have a little rum or something in it,” he said.
Cannoli vs. king cake
Isabella DeFelicibus found it hard to get past the name of the Beachside king cake, because she said traditional cannolis did not include cream cheese.
“It’s not a traditional cannoli cream, but I’m full-blooded Italian,” she said. “So, I feel that has a big part of it because I know what a cannoli is supposed to taste like.”
For the record, Beachside says there is absolutely no cream cheese in the recipe. It’s all ricotta.
Beachside’s creative take on an Italian favorite sparked a lively debate on how a pastry chef could create something original without veering too far off from what most people expected a king cake (or cannoli) to be.
For Pearce, the cannoli cake was vastly different from what she was used to, but she said she loved the way it borrowed from the laminated dough and puff pastry tradition of original king cakes yet catered to the eclectic tastes of this region.
“When you eat a cannoli, you’re eating something that’s crunchy and then something that’s soft on the inside and they nailed that,” Pearce said. “So, if we’re doing a cannoli king cake, I feel like that’s a good cannoli king cake because they nailed it in a lot of different aspects.”
And the winner is ...
In the end, Lolly’s traditional dough beat out Beachside’s originality as words like “perfection” were bandied about the room.
“Going with my traditional roots, I would have to go towards the softer, turtle king cake, even though it was really, really sweet,” Pearce said. “In my mind, it just brings back all of those memories from the past.”
Sunday kicks off the MS Coast’s biggest food week of the year. What will you be eating?
Who has the best king cake on the Mississippi Coast? Vote in final round of our bracket
