KINGS CAKE: THREE WISE MEN CAKE
Delicious and juicy Spanish pastry
In Spain it’s celebrated the Three Wise Men day on the 6th of January. The day is celebrated with Christmas presents and delicious food. Something that is almost a must in every table is this delicious cake. This is normally eaten as part of the breakfast or accompanying the coffee/hot chocolate during the evening.
There are a lot of traditions around this cake; normally there are a bean and a small figure hidden in the cake. The person that eats the slice where the figure is hidden is crowned as king; but the person that eats the slice where the bean is hidden shall pay for the cake.
But something very special this day is that the children are very happy because they get the Christmas presents; nowadays a lot of them get the presents on Christmas Day, but when we were children, we were looking forward for this day. The day is celebrated with the family and it marks the end of the Christmas period.
The same cake recipe is used to celebrate Easter, but then the decoration changes. The cake is decorated with eggs (here we recommend kinder egg –delicious–), colored feathers, little yellow chickens. The day is celebrated with family and friends.
STARTER
70 ml whole milk
10 g fresh yeast
130 g sieved wheat flour
1 tsp sugar
DOUGH:
450 g sieved wheat flour
60 ml whole milk
70 g butter (at room temperature)
2 egg
20 g fresh yeast
1 sp orange juice
1 sp rum
1 pinch of salt
120 g icing sugar
zest from ½ orange and ½ lemon
Tricks!
The cake is not easy to make and very difficult to get it perfect the first day you bake it, but it becomes better after a couple of times, so just keep trying.
Ingredients (2 uds around 500 g each):
Directions:
The first thing that must be done is to prepare the starter.
Warm up a bit of milk and add the fresh yeast, mix it until completely dissolved. Put this in a large bowl and add 1 tsp of sugar, mix, sieve the flour and add a little at a time. Knead by hand and create a ball. Fill the bowl with warm water (between 26 and 33 ˚C), and put the starter ball in the water until the dough floats (it usually takes around 10 min).
You can now start preparing the dough. Sieve the flour in the mixer’s bowl and make a hole in the middle, where you are going to have the eggs, the milk with the yeast, the sugar, the orange and lemon zest, the butter at room temperature, the salt, the orange juice, the rum and the starter. Start the mixer and let it work during 10 minutes at low speed (2-3 position in a Kenwood machine).
When it finishes, grease your hands with some neutral oil, take the dough out from the bowl and knead on the countertop during some minutes until you get a smooth, shiny and elastic dough. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let the dough rise until double size (this process takes about 5-6 hours depending on the temperature in your kitchen).
Take the dough out from the bowl, with greased hands, deflate it and divide in two. Give the cake its typical shape as a large bagel; let the hole in the middle be quite big since the dough will rise until at least double the size before it’s baked. Put it on a baking tray covered with baking paper. Cover with a clean kitchen towel and let it rise again until at least double size, this time the process is shorter; it should take around 2-3 hours.
1 whipped egg
Sugar moistened with a few drops of water.
Orange slices, almonds sliced or coarse grounded (you can choose between using only one of them or a mixture of them).
Baking process:
Preheat the oven at 180˚C (with hot air and warm both up and down), put a tray with water on the bottom of the oven. While the oven is heating up, decorate your cake with orange slices, sugar or coarse ground almond (or just like you like). Bake during approx. 20-30 min, take out from the oven and wait until it has cooled completely before cutting it.