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Cake Carnage and Making Babies

"I got the baby!"

I love those plastic babies that abound during Carnival season. If you ever found one lurking in your slice of King Cake, then you know the feeling of being pretend king or queen for the day, a fleeting yet satisfying feeling.

In this issue, we issued a challenge to a variety of artist to redesign or being inspired by the King Cake baby in some kind of design. But where did those babies come from? Like most traditions around making babies, roots of the King Cake lie in ancient pagan roots. Sex and fertility, it seems, are at the root of most traditions that last.

Celebration of Twelfth Night, (January 6 on modern calendars, the Twelfth Night after Christmas) goes way back to Pagan and ancient Roman times. The darkest part of the winter from Winter Solstice to Twelfth night was a great time to celebrate, party and get a little crazy for many cultures. Twelfth Night celebrations seem to have a common ancestor in the King of Saturnalia from Roman times. This popularly elected "King," also given the delightful name of the "Lord of Misrule," presided over an old Roman festival that honored Saturn, the god of agriculture and civilization. The elected royalty would party all night and have a grand old time, and lead the crowd in unbridled fun and passion around the bonfire. Back then, at the end of a year of reign, the faux royalty had to sacrifice themselves to the death at that same bonfire in order to insure fertility of the crops. Sometimes it's good that traditions change, if you know what I mean.

I think Queens Emily and Linda would agree.

But from those roots, those early frivolities seem to share a theme with more modern times. They seem to share the idea that someone is picked by chance to have the glory and the power of being royalty. A-Queen-For-A-Day kind of thing. Choosing your mock royalty by hiding a token in a cake goes way back. The Romans favored the tradition of a fava bean or coin in a piece of cake. The fava bean was a symbol of fertility for the Romans and an important dietary staple. He who found it was elected The Bean King, The Lord Of Misrule, He Who Was Headed Toward The Funeral Pyre.

Well, of course, the Pagans couldn't be allowed to run wild for too long before the Church got involved. The Church knew that people had so much fun and folly during the mid winter feasts that they would never give it up and get baptized. So like many of the old rituals involving celebrations, the Church absorbed the masking, disguise, the chaos and the reign of a Bean King into a sort of Judeo-Christian tradition. In a great article on the history of the King Cake tradition, King Cakes: A Rich Tradition, the author writes, " In Europe, from the 16th century onward, Carnival came to be more or less accepted by Church fathers as a necessary period of foolishness and folly before the fasting and abstinence of Lent. Hence, Mardi Gras or Fat Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday, which marks the beginning of Lent, was one of feasting."

This festival also retained its emphasis on masking and mock royalty. The Italians really got into the spirit and to this day, Carnivale and the exquisite Italian paper and clay masks are well known around the world. The Creole Society of the South adopted the party aspect of the whole Carnival idea with the same passion as the Italians and tapped into the Spanish custom of throwing grand balls where a king and queen were chosen. Parades started, krewes went wild and suddenly everyone was masking and having so much fun and forgetting to go to work that the authorities actually outlawed Mardi Gras for a while in New Orleans. That didn't last very long. (You know the drill. If beads are outlawed, then only outlaws will have beads.)

The Twelfth Night Celebration signals the beginning to the Carnival season which last through Mardi Gras day. One of the longest lasting krewes in this country, the Twelfth Night Revelers, hosts the first Carnival ball on January 6th in New Orleans and names their chosen king "the Lord of Misrule." It is actually quite a serious affair but at the heart of the celebration, the TNR still poke fun at royalty by taking on different roles, dressing up to mock royalty, and masking.

During its early years, TNR embraced the tradition of a cake of randomly picking someone to be the King (who would then choose his Queen) for the evening of frivolity and mayhem. Turns out at many of the Twelfth Night Balls, when the partygoers got to the choosing a piece of cake (adorned with a true crown destined for the person who would find the token), it was a "first-come-first-served-all-bets-off" fiasco. One article described an early attempt at choosing the evenings royalty by finding the charm as "cake carnage." The token was never found because the inebriated guests made such a mess of the cake, so no queen was appointed that first official ball. A delightful image, isn't it? Ladies and gents of the court with cake crumbs and frosting staining those divine silk gowns and trousers. Now, the piece containing the token is carefully guided toward the predetermined royalty and entourage. No one gets hurt and no one is stuck with an outrageous drycleaning bill.

Twelfth Night, January 6, is the feast of the Epiphany, the night the Three Kings found Jesus in the stable and brought him frankincense, gold and myrrh. The day also marks the beginning of Carnival season. The token included in the cake developed to not only be a bean or a pea or a coin, but sometimes a figurine. The French make collector figurines, sometimes of royalty or court figures. In the United States during the l1800's, often times the token was a pecan or a coin. Some plantation owners were also known to put jewels in the cake. The little plastic baby became popular in this county in the mid 1900s, of course after plastic was invented and we made friends with China.

King Cakes are taken to work or offered at parties. The New Orleans tradition is that each person takes a piece of cake and whoever gets the baby in their cake is "crowned" King or Queen for the day and that person is obligated to bring the next King Cake to work or host the next party. Some krewes also use the King Cake to choose their royalty for the upcoming Carnival season.

Like gumbo, every baker of a King Cake seems to have his or her own preference about what it really should be. The standard is made with a rich dough, more like a coffee cake than a traditional cake and cover with sugar topic in the traditional Mardi Gras color: purple representing justice, green representing faith, and gold representing power. New Orleans bakers have love to experiment and make chocolate, blueberry, cream cheese, pecan praline, even crawfish.

King Cakes, once used to choose the life of the party, now also earned the religious symbolism. There are tons of traditions and stories out there, and I don't know which ones are the true and accepted ones. Some include that baby represents the baby Jesus, who is the true King; the circular nature of the cake symbolizes the journey of the Wise Men who traveled to find Him; and the braiding of the dough represents the twists and turns the Wise Men took in order to hide their trail from King Herod, who wanted to kill the newborn king to protect his own reign. The purple, green and gold sugar that adorns every cake represents the official Mardi Gras Colors, representing, Justice, Faith and Power.

The baby remains one of the most endearing images of the Carnival Season. Let's get serious--- babies are cooler than beans or pecans. Now you can find baby figures that are pink, Caucasian, black, metallic blue, green gold and purple, glow in the dark cherubs with wings, and like most things Mardi Gras, are made in China. They are not just hidden away in cakes. The ubiquitous babies adorn necklaces, beads, tiaras, and jewelry as part of the celebration. The customs keep developing and keep changing. But the basics of the tradition remain.

You got your Bean King. Your Lord of Misrule. Your hiding behind a mask. Your cake carnage. Your human sacrifice. The king and queen expected to lead the willing into mayhem, fun and excess and espirit de corps. Your royalty chosen by chance. And all of it represented in the little bare-naked amorphous form of the King Cake baby. An endearing symbol of Mardi Gras if there ever was one.

Babies. That's what I'm talking about. We got lots of them in this issue. Take a look. And if you are lucky enough to shout, "I got the baby!" this season, all hail to you. See you at the bonfire.

********************** For an exhaustive look at the history of King Cake, go to: King Cakes: A Rich Tradition

All Rights Reserved. Copyright Aileen McInnis 2007.