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During the height of the pandemic, the thought — much less the practice — of sharing king cake with other people outside your household was a big no. That meant no office king cakes and no house party king cakes and no parade route king cakes. For those of us with a household of two and the single folks out there, this left the option of buying an entire cake and eating all of it or wasting most of it. In hindsight you could freeze slices and thaw them out to eat throughout Carnival, but until recently that didn’t occur to anyone in our friend group. Even then however, you’d only get to try one flavor. Enter the king cake club. A brilliant idea — whether you are in lockdown or not — to have your king cake and eat it too.

Here's how we do it:

1. Determine Club Members and Create a Schedule: Each person or household is assigned a weekend of Carnival season. Obviously, it helps if the club has exactly the right number of individuals or teams, but if you have more weekends than people, ask members to volunteer to take extra weekends. It’s a great problem to have, no?  
2. Decide Where Members Will Get Cakes: This isn’t obligatory, but if your goal is to try cakes in a variety of flavors from different bakeries, planning it out helps prevent duplicates. 
3. Pick Method of Delivery or Gathering Day and Time: When gatherings were cautioned against by the CDC, our club members porch dropped slices to fellow members to maintain social distancing. For the most part, we’ve continued doing the porch drops, but if members are home we’ll visit for a spell. Now that we can gather again, on parade days we might get together and share the cake in person at a house party or on the route.   
4. Enjoy: Dig into your delicious cake of the week sans a brioche-sized inch around your waste (or at least not one that is the result of eating an entire king cake).
5. Babies: Since everyone in the group is buying a cake at some point, babies and fèves have become more of a trophy for our club members. Whomever gets the bébé snaps a pic and sends it around to the group with a jokey message. Several of us enjoy writing gushy, pun-filled baby announcements. Some pranksters have hidden a baby in every slice. Lately, the babies have begun to range from gold and silver and a variety of skin tones to these cute little blue guys. As you might imagine, our krewe de cake members now each have large, diverse nurseries. 
6. Create Your Own Rules or Toss out the Rules: The above is the way we do it, but hey, this is New Orleans, do whatcha wanna.

Are you in a king cake club? Are you a purist and wish these NOLA carpet baggers would stop with their nonsense? Email me at melanie@myneworleans.com.