by Shay Sokol

With a smattering of Creole King Cakes expanding our belts, we at NoDef have had quite the sugar rush over the past week (and we got the love-handles to prove it). With La Boulangerie’s French-style cake, we move to the motherland herself. The French King Cake has puff pastry layers with a denser center of frangipane, which must be  French for heaven. Well, that’s what we thought it meant, until we learned it actually means that delicious layer of almond paste.

Chef and owner Dominique Rizzo has been baking the offering for a decade. La Boulangerie’s French King Cake is quite different from your typical New Orleans-style King Cake. Lacking the Mardis Gras colors and chaotic sugar decorations, La Boulangerie’s French King Cake has a simpler look. The consistency among their beautifully browned and lightly glazed French cakes proves some serious baking.  The puffy part of the cake is pleasantly lighter than other King Cakes’ denser, doughier brioche/challah-like breadiness. And at the center of it all is the golden creaminess of the almond paste that keeps the rest of the flakey pastry together. One bite and eyes are guaranteed to roll heavenward.

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Of course, a different kind of King Cake has a tradition of its own. French King Cakes are, like their bakers, typically more secular than their New Orleans counterpart. Upon biting in, the threat of breaking teeth does not come from the Christ child. Instead, the culprit is a porcelain trinket called “la féve,” which represents anything from Tin-Tin to a miniature Peugeot. French grandmothers have been known to collect these trinkets, year after year, as all grandmothers have been known to collect things, year after year.

Katell Oijubin, Rizzo's wife, explained that in France, the youngest child goes under the table and calls out the name of the person who is to eat each slice. This ensures blind justice in the distribution of the cake. Whoever gets the trinket dons a paper crown, which is also included,  and chooses a king or queen to join him/her in royalty for the rest of the night. Like the New Orleans tradition, whoever gets the trinket is often expected to supply the next cake.

Katell was excited to show off the porcelain trinkets that can be found in their cakes. After biting in and hearing the death metal-style crunch, out of your mouth, along with your tooth, will come a tiny musical instrument. Later on, as Mardis Gras gets closer, the bakers will switch to colorful little king’s crowns. As a result, we now cannot wait to become grandmothers.

The bakery also produces a traditional New Orleans King Cake, which we did not try. But, if the aesthetics are any indication, this will also be a winner. Rizzo offers the New Orleans-style King Cake in three flavors: raspberry, cinnamon, and cream cheese & chocolate.

La Boulangerie offers four different sizes of the French King Cakes: one for
$13 that feeds 4 people, $18 feeding 6, $24 feeding 8, and $29 feeding 10.
Dominique suggests you warm them in the oven at 200 degrees for 10 minutes
in the special bag that they come in (at our fine facilities at NoDef, we
used a microwave for less than a minute and were very satisfied, to say the
least). You can also get their New Orleans King Cakes in a small or large at
$12 and $16, respectively.

La Boulangerie is located at 4526 Magazine St. Call 504.269.3777.