A nice French epiphany tradition

There is a nice French epiphany culinary tradition that I very much appreciate - that of the galette des Rois (or King Cake, as it's known in English, according to that inexhaustible source of online wisdom, Wikipedia). The kings in the name of the cake come from the three Biblical kings, who apparently visited Baby Jesus on Epiphany. Enough about the history, let's get down to what's important, what the cake is like. It's made up of flaky puff pastry layers with a dense center of  frangipane.



It is sold all over France, at supermarkets and bakeries, after pretty much all of January. What's nice about the galette des Rois tradition is that a figurine, or feve, is hidden within the cake. And whoever gets the feve has to buy a new king cake. So as you can guess, dear reader, plenty of king cake gets eaten in January. I lost count of how many I had at the office ;-).


Anyways, we decided to make our own galette des Rois this weekend - well nearly anyway - we bought a kit ;-). But we still had to mix the frangipane pasty and so forth, so let's say it was half home-made ;-). But anyways, I have to say, the end result was rather excellent for a price of 4 Euros or so (compare that to paying between 10 and 20 Euros at a bakery...). Yummie! (as you can see in the picture above!)