Why We’re Buying Queen Cakes This Mardi Gras
Levee Baking Co.’s galette de reine is made with puff pastry, filled with almond custard, and topped with a ceramic moon.
In New Orleans, king cake is well, king. From King’s Day (the feast of the Epiphany on January 6) to Fat Tuesday (this year on March 1), the ring-shaped brioche-style cakes covered in frosting and yellow, green, and purple sugar rule the city. Every baker has their own version. Every citizen has their favorite variety. You can find king cakes on t-shirts, leggings, door hangers, and even tattoos across the parish. People are serious about their king cake.
But for the past few Mardi Gras seasons, there’s a new cake gaining steam in the city: the queen cake. While you can find them at various bakeries around the city, the queen cake at Uptown’s Levee Baking Co. is particularly special. Levee founder Christina Balzebre created her reimagined cake four years ago and it’s rapidly become a favorite in this city of pastry connoisseurs.
The bakery’s “galette de reine” (queen cake) is Balzebre’s take on a galette de rois, a traditional French pastry baked in January to celebrate the feast of the Epiphany. Galette de rois is made with puff pastry and filled with frangipani (a type of almond custard).
Balzebre’s galette de reine is also made with two irresistibly flaky layers of puff pastry, but filled with local pecans and citrus for a cake that’s truly rooted in the landscape of the Gulf Coast. Everything is made at the bakery, from the pastry itself down to the filling.
There’s also an explicitly feminist bent to Levee’s queen cake, where the combination of the name and the moon féve gives a decidedly feminine air.
In 2018, Balzebre’s queen cake was born out of necessity—she was operating as a pop-up inside the popular Mosquito Supper Club and didn’t have the space to create the more traditional large New Orleans-style yeasted dough king cake. She wanted to produce a cake for Mardi Gras season, but felt “burnt out” on the king cakes expected during Carnival season.
“For me, having worked in so many commercial kitchens over the years, when you’re a baker during Mardi Gras, it is hard. It is some of the hardest work,” she says. “So I thought, If we’re going to do this, let’s do galette de rois, which is a bit easier and takes up less space to make. I’ll use pecans instead of almonds. Plus, citrus season is at the same time as Mardi Gras, so it just came together and offers something a little different for this time of year.”
The queen cake takes about three days to create, from making and resting the pastry dough to putting the filling together. “It’s complicated to make but in the end, it’s very simple ingredients,” Balzebre says. The careful, delicate designs on the top of each cake are made with a paring knife on cold dough.
For Balzebre, who has lived in New Orleans for 17 years, local ingredients are at the heart of her reimagined Carnival cake. “The whole ethos behind the bakery is making sure everything is as locally produced as possible,” she says. “We use local pecans, which we toast ourselves, and citrus, which we candy for the filling ourselves. Sometimes it’s kumquats, sometimes it’s tangerine or blood oranges, sometimes grapefruit. ”
While most king cakes come with a plastic baby inside—whoever gets the baby in their piece gets either a year of good luck or has to buy the next king cake, depending on the company you keep—Levee’s is accompanied by a ceramic moon féve. A féve is a small trinket hidden in Mardi Gras cakes, a tradition found from France to Louisiana. Back before plastic was de rigueur, ceramic babies or other shapes of féves (shoes, vegetables, etc.), would have been common in New Orleans king cakes.
Each féve is handmade by local ceramicist Jackie Brown, who researched old-style king cake féves. Together with Balzebre, she settled on a moon shape for the galette de reine. Brown makes several large batches of small ceramic moons with faces for the bakery each Mardi Gras season, using a cast and then hand-painting details like lips, cheeks, and eyelashes. So far in 2022, Brown has made about 450 moon fevés for Levee.
There’s also an explicitly feminist bent to Levee’s queen cake, where the combination of the name and the moon féve gives a decidedly feminine air. (I recently had a Levee queen cake at a baby shower, which felt incredibly fitting.) “Flipping the script is important,” Balzebre says. “There’s a lot of feminism intertwined into my business in general.” The intention behind every queen cake is evident. Each cake has a slightly different design, with the féve placed with care on top.
Competition for a Levee queen cake can be stiff—you’ll need to pre order online at least a day before to score a $35 cake (or a slice for $4). Cakes often sell out at Levee’s brick-and-mortar bakery, nestled in a mint green building just off New Orleans’ bustling Magazine Street.
Balzebre also emphasizes the teamwork behind a queen cake production. Every cake—about 20 to 50 a day, depending on the point in the season and how high demand is—has been worked on by four to five Levee employees, including Balzebre herself. As she puts its: “For bakers, the season of Mardi Gras is a team effort.”