Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday, so this must be Fat Tuesday, the culmination of Mardi Gras. Tuesday afternoons Martin attends the kids program at our church. Last week, our pastor announced that he planned to serve king cake today.

When Samara, who had taken Martin to the kids program, informed me of this king cake development, I was weirded out. This isn’t New Orleans, and my church isn’t Roman Catholic. We are stuffy Northeastern Protestants. The last time I ate a king cake, I was a 22-year-old graduate student dating a Louisianan whose mother FedExed us the delicacy. (I recall that a Jewish friend found the Baby Jesus trinket, which subsequently was stolen by PeeWee the cat, who batted poor Baby Jesus mercilessly about the parquet floor.) On the other hand, Samara—who is not only Roman Catholic and of Latin American origin, but unable to see Martin deprived of anything—jumped all over the king cake idea. By the time I returned home Wednesday evening, from a mediation I was attending in Los Angeles, Samara had downloaded a recipe for “Paleo” king cake, invented her own sweetened cashew cream filling, and spent four hours baking this:

We popped that base in the freezer. Yesterday I moved it to the refrigerator to defrost. This afternoon I created a frosting/glaze. In the Vitamix, I blended 1/4 cup melted coconut oil, 1/4 cup coconut cream, 1/4 cup cashew butter, 1/4 teaspoon sea salt, and 3 tablespoons raw honey. I spread that on the defrosted king cake:

Next, I used an India Tree decorating set to color four bowls of organic shredded coconut:

Finally, I sprinkled the dyed coconut onto the frosted king cake to replicate the traditional multi-colored appearance:

Martin took the cake to church this afternoon and loved the treat. I’m not sure if I have Samara’s patience to make this every year, but a new tradition just might have been born.

Postscript: Apparently the pastor had trouble finding a local bakery in the business of assembling king cakes this year; by the weekend he had changed course and declared today’s kids program “pancake dinner”—the tradition much more associated with us uptight, Shrove Tuesday types. Of course, the pancakes were not Martin-approved, and the homemade king cake was already in my freezer. So while the rest of the kids had pancakes, Martin ate like a king.

At least he shared.