Mardi Gras

A nice lady at work with ties to New Orleans brought two very delicious kingcakes for us to enjoy and we did! Yes, it really was Fat Tuesday which means Iwill have an even fatter Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, well, you get the picture. These king cakes we had today were good, kind of like coffee cake with gooey caramel and pecans in the center. Apparently, this nice lady knows where to get the good king cake hook up. As I was munching on my king cake, I began to drift away into a memory of king cakes past. King cake always reminds me of my little niece, Elizabeth. I never will forget one year, my sister, Carla decided to do something a little different, something extra special for Elizabeth's birthday. Elizabeth is her granddaughter. At some point in time, Carla apparently had a very tastey king cake like the one I had today and thought it would be very special to order a king cake straight from New Orleans for Elizabeth's birthday party. Sometimes Mardi Gras and her birthday coincide, not this year, but sometimes they do. Carla supposedly had the name of a reputable king cake baker so she thought. She either called the place or ordered it off the Internet. I am not sure which. At any rate, she ordered a king cake by some method to be delivered via mail for Elizabeth's birthday. See anything wrong here? A cake in the mail? Hello! How does that work? Apparently not so well. Carla had the big delivery box on the dining table and we were all ganged 'round waiting for the unveiling of the KING CAKE! Whoopee, right? Par-tay down! Wrong. When the box was opened, we were all a bit stunned, taken aback or should I say, disappointed. It must have been a typically warm Louisiana-Texas winter because all of what had once been the lovely purple, green, and gold refined sugar sprinkled atop the king cake had all melted combining into one black, shiney mess. It looked sad. Nobody said anything. We just all looked at each other in silence. Then, the small, quiet voice of Elizabeth says "Oh,Mimi, I am not eating any of that. That looks awful." She was right, it did look like merde. (French for not so good.) I can still see her standing there looking at that pitiful cake. She was kind of holding her face with a worried look like someone had just delivered the news that a giant meteor was on a collision course with Earth. Fortunately, we had some other type of dessert to imbibe. The king cake was just supposed to be the piece de resistance. (French for disaster.) To make bad matters worse, we sorted all through that cake and there wasn't even a baby in it. I figure the baby took one look at that thing and R-U-N-N O-F-T.