Does your king cake even have to be a cake to be the most coveted king cake of the season? Evidently not, to judge from the success that Daphne-based Gourmet Goodies is having with its crawfish king cake.
In the kitchen, Candace Callister flattened out the dough for one of the cakes, then cut open a premeasured bag of filling and began spreading it out. She then painstakingly rolled the dough into a heavy cylinder. It took the help of a second person to transfer the tube to a baking sheet, where Callister shaped it into a ring so that it was ready to go into an oven.
When he arrived to pick it up, he identified himself as one of the organizers of the King Cake Extravaganza, a fundraiser presented by the Friends of St. Alphonsus Art & Cultural Center in New Orleans. He was collecting entries from the Florida Panhandle and coastal Alabama, he said, and Gourmet Goodies’ crawfish cake was on his list.
Because Gourmet Goodies’ regular meal prep and catering business accounts for a lot of its kitchen production, Stafford and Sylkatis couldn’t just drop everything and crank out cakes. But they’re doing everything they can to meet the public’s appetite for crawfish king cakes. They’ve added employees, Stafford said, and they’ve been thinking about adding a night shift.