c. 2007 Religion News Service

NEW ORLEANS _ A newcomer to this city walked in the bakery door one day holding a small doll in a little napkin.

“She pulled me over to one side and said, `Son, I don’t want to make a big stink, but I found this in my cake,”’ remembers David Haydel Jr., a manager at Haydel’s Bakery. “I had to explain to her the whole scenario.”

Welcome to southern Louisiana, where the many rich culinary traditions include the deliberate baking of foreign objects _ especially tiny plastic babies _ into cakes during Carnival.

“And it’s expected!” says Sam Schelfo, owner of Gambino’s Bakeries. “To make a real king cake, you have to have a doll.”

The sudden mouthful of plastic is a seasonal sensation.

“Outside Louisiana, people don’t have a clue about it,” Haydel said. “We get out-of-town film crews filming about Mardi Gras who say, `Tell us again, something in the cake, a bean or a baby?”’

Gambino’s gets its gold plastic babies directly from China, Schelfo said.

“We usually order 100,000 to 125,000 every year, but that was pre-Katrina. We can’t make that much anymore because of the (shortage of staff). We order 65,000 to 75,000 now.”

As of early last week, Roy Thomas, head baker at Dorignac’s bakery, had used 5,472 king cake babies in his made-from-scratch cinnamon king cake dough. He orders them through a baking supply company.

“Sometimes customers ask for ethnic babies,” Thomas said. “We only use two, black and white.”

At Randazzo’s Camellia City Bakery in Slidell, co-owner Tricia Randazzo-Zornes said the company uses “thousands (of babies). You just keep going until you drop. We stopped counting a long time ago.”

Bakers said customers sometimes ask for multiple babies, especially when king cakes are headed for classrooms, so every child can get the baby. Maybe one of every 200 king cake buyers don’t want any babies at all, said Schelfo, whose four bakeries sell about 800 to 900 king cakes a day during Carnival.

So now that we know where king cake babies come from, why are they there in the first place?

New Orleanians know that whoever gets the baby buys the next king cake, but there are other theories. At least three bakeries believe the king cake baby has religious roots.

“It has to do with the baby Jesus,” one bakery owner said, noting that king cake season commences on Jan. 6, the Feast of the Epiphany.

“The word `epiphany’ means `to show’ and Bethlehem was where Jesus was first shown. We put that in the cake, commemorating the birth of the infant Jesus, the symbol of the holy day.

“I think in the past they might have used beans and coins. I’m not sure how it evolved. We have a lot of Catholics in New Orleans so that might have something to do with it.”

Schelfo, of Gambino’s, said the presence of the foreign object in the king cake has had different significance and connotations through the years. “In the early part of the century, it was a fava bean,” he said.

The tradition of putting favors in cakes goes back to the French galettes des Rois, said historian Errol Laborde, whose latest book, “Krewe: Early New Orleans Carnival Comus to Zulu,” just debuted.

“A lot of times, things are done and significance is attached later,” Laborde said. “New Orleans had a tradition of putting a baby in the king cake, and from that built the significance of the Christ Child. I just don’t know if that’s true or not.”

The babies may have become one of the iconic symbols of Carnival, but Laborde points out that king cakes used to be a mere footnote to Carnival. He has seen them explode into a major industry in the past 15 to 20 years, due to overnight shipping, the Internet, and because the cake is a better confection, with fillings, richer dough and pretty toppings.

One of this year’s hottest Mardi Gras collectibles is a king cake baby that’s not a baby at all: It’s a miniature porcelain FEMA trailer, decorated for Mardi Gras, found in Haydel’s Bakery king cakes.

“They are unique this year,” Haydel said. “We’re selling more this year than we have every other year.”

(Judy Walker is food editor for The Times-Picayune of New Orleans.)

KRE/PH END WALKER

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