King Cake fever is spreading across NOLA. With a shorter Mardi Gras season this year, people in New Orleans seem to be even more fixated on the parties, parades and everything else that comes with this unique celebration.
That includes King Cake. It could be me, but it feels like King Cakes have been selling out quicker this year. Bakeries throughout the region are very busy trying to meet the demand for King Cake. People are standing in extra-long lines at the crack of dawn to get their hands on their favorite King Cake. You’d think with that kind of loyalty, somebody would’ve written a book on King Cake, but that wasn’t the case.
“Every year, when carnival season came around, I would write a few articles about King Cake, and I noticed that those articles always did better than anything else I wrote all year long. I was like, man, when was the last time somebody wrote a book about this, and it turns out nobody had written a book about it. So, that’s how the Big Book of King Cake got started,” said Matt Haines.
Matt is a freelance journalist based in New Orleans who began writing for a living after completing a personal journey. Back in 2017, Matt had just been fired from a job in New Orleans and was fresh off a breakup with a former partner. He started walking the Appalachian Trail, from Georgia to Maine. It was a 2,189-mile, 159-day trip. During that time, Matt wrote about his experiences along the trail for an online publication in New Orleans.
“So, every 2-3 weeks or so I would go to a hostel along the trail and just kind of type up my notes. People liked it and more people were reading it than I thought we’re going to read it. There were a lot of people commenting on it. I had beforehand I liked to write. I just didn’t know how I could turn that into a career, but it was something that I enjoyed. I wasn’t making very much money writing these blog posts, but I was like, OK, let me just try. Let me see what I can do and see how this goes,” Matt told me.
He came back to New Orleans and decided to put that plan into motion. He wrote about food and travel for local newspapers and publications, but also national media. Matt said his articles on King Cake seemed to get the most traction and traffic. He was surprised that no one had written a coffee table style book on King Cake. So, he worked out a deal with a publisher which involved him taking on the lion’s share of the cost to produce a book on King Cake. He interviewed 75 bakers in the New Orleans area. In late 2021, those bakers’ stories, their King Cakes and the inspiration behind them became the heart of The Big Book of King Cake. It’s available at local stores and online at www.thebigbookofkingcake.com. While there’s a seemingly never-ending debate about which bakery has the best King Cake, Matt says his book isn’t focused on settling that debate.
“The book was originally going to be about these beautiful cakes, and then pretty quickly, I realized this is so much more interesting if it’s about the people who make the cakes and how they came about creating their specific cake,” said Matt.
So, what did Matt learn visiting with all those bakers? What’s his favorite King Cake? And what’s King Cake’s connection to ancient Rome? Listen to the podcast here.
In this episode I sit down with a man who authored two books on King Cakes, a move I believe is bold for someone who wasn’t born and raised in New Orleans.