YatCuisine

The backstory:

Last week, I was working on a poll, "who has the best king cake." A couple of folks pointed me at previous polls, and one thing I noticed was that one of the choices was regularly "Randazzo's." Now, back in the day, you either had to work with a Chalmatian, or you were making a pilgrimage down to Da Parish to get a Randazzo's king cake. These days, it's a bit easier, since there are four bakeries claiming a piece of the Chalmette legacy. So, I through the issue out to Da Twittah: Is there any significant difference between the Randazzo's king cakes?

The response was immediate and passionate--YES. On that note, I added the four places as individual poll choices. About this time, Chris Johnston (TechChris.com) suggested we do a blind taste test of the four to see what people really think.

Wow, that was almost a serious analytical task. Can't be too serious, of course, since it involves king cake, but Chris was on to something. Tweet-up!

Since this was a serious, analytical, scientific task, we needed a serious venue. So we gathered in a comic shop. Thanks to Jason and his staff at BSI Comics for letting us use the upstairs! This area is where BSI has Friday Night Magic and other tournaments. In fact, three of our tasters were the guys already up there, playing a board game.

We had four king cakes in the taste test. I picked up three of them, and Greta got the fourth.

The four king cakes were from:

Manny Randazzo's in Metry
Dianne Randazzo's in Harahan
Nonna Randazzo's in Covington
Randazzo's Camellia City Bakery in Slidell

The three from Metry, Harahan, and Slidell looked almost identical. The fourth, from Nonna Randazzo's in Covington, had those little round, hard-candy sprinkles on it rather than the purple-green-gold sprinkles the other three had.

Before anybody got there, Kev (my kiddo) and I got our three unwraped and set up. When Greta got there, I made everyone turn around as we slipped it into position.

King Cake #1 was Manny, #2 Camellia City, #3 Nonna and #4 Dianne.

The comments were interesting! The general consensus was that there was little difference between #1 and #2. The Nonna Randazzo cake was the obviously different one, because of the sprinkles. The main difference observed between the Dianne Randazzo cake and #1 and #2 was that Dianne cake had a more profound cinnamon taste.

Of course, there was one comment that all four king cakes had too much icing. This is a common complaint about Randazzo-recipe cakes, and one that we fans of the recipe immediately reject.

The results:

The only person that knew the order of the cakes was my son.

Thanks again to Jason for hosting the gathering. It was fun to meet a bunch of y'all!

And don't forget to get your 'DATMAN shirt:

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