New Orleans King Cake

The official colors of Mardi gras in New Orleans are purple, gold and green. Here you see the side of a typically colored, typically doughnut shaped king cake. I was inspired for a lot of my Mardi Gras dinner by Danno of New Orleans Cuisine, who posted a gorgeous-looking king cake recipe on his blog. He planned to make a brioche dough as the basis of the cake. That's where he lost me. My culinary past is scarred with many horrendous results but none so painfully sticky as the time I made brioche. I swear that stuff is impossible.

So I went with this easy but ill-explained recipe that I'll never make again. Thinking I'd make my life a little easier, I went from bad to worse with this recipe. I think I added too much flour 'cause it was hard and heavy as a rock, not to mention purple, green and gold, which to the Italian eye didn't look traditional, it just looked ugly. Oh well, as Julia Child once said, "the good thing about cooking is that you can eat your mistakes".