When it comes to king cake flavors, the traditional cinnamon sugar version is taking a backseat to a flood of creative flavors sure to tempt the most adventurous palate.
And that’s fine with chocolate lover Shannon Walls, who recently stopped by Lilah’s Bakery to pick up a chocolate chips and cream king cake to take to work in celebration of a coworker’s birthday.
“Last week, I had just chocolate and we like the Bavarian cream, and the regular cream cheese is always good. Well, anything I’ve ever had here has been good,” said Walls, who estimates she buys 10 to 15 king cakes each Mardi Gras season.
“I ship one to Mississippi for my best friend. I ship one to one of my good friends in Georgia. I take one to a couple of my friends here in town and I always swing by just to get some for the office.”
At Lilah’s, she has 22 regular flavors from which to choose. And, for the first time this year, the bakery is offering a one-time flavor of the week. So far, that’s included triple berry and cream, bananas foster and pina colada, which flew out of the store, according to co-owner Lisa Tike.
It’s likely the most popular of the flavors of the week will find their way onto next year’s regular menu.
Tike said their overall bestsellers are cream cheese, cinnamon and cream, pralines and cream, Bavarian cream, strawberries and cream, blueberries and cream, raspberries and cream and cinnamon sugar.
It’s carnival season and that means king cakes are popping up in bakeries and grocery stores all over Louisiana. When it comes to king cakes, everyone has their opinion on who has the best. Whether you like your king cakes filled with cream cheese, fresh fruit, or just plain cinnamon, these are just some of the top places from around the state.
6. Lilah’s (Shreveport) Opened in 2006, this family run bakery has been in business since 2006. They have 15 flavors to choose from and also do a flavor of the week.
A drool-worthy roundup of variations for king cake lovers and adventurous foodies.
Creative Styles of King Cake: Lilah’s – Shreveport – Lilah’s may look like a classic on the outside but you can get this cake filled with just about any flavor you can think of AND they have a gluten free option!
Megan Wyatt, mbwyatt@theadvertiser.com Published 11:23 a.m. CT Jan. 20, 2016
Sometimes, a piece of king cake isn’t worth the calories. But other times, it’s worth every indulgent bite.
If you’ve been avoiding the king cakes in your office break room and at weekend parties, I’m talking to you.
There are a few truly indulgent king cakes in Louisiana that shouldn’t be missed.
These aren’t the dry, cinnamon-roll-gone-wrong king cakes. These are the intricate, moist and unique-filled king cakes.
Here are a few of Louisiana’s most indulgent, worth-every-calorie king cakes…
3. The tiramisu king cake
The tiramisu king cake at Lilah’s Bakery in Shreveport is a must.
The tiramisu king cake at Lilah’s Bakery in Shreveport is a must. (Photo: Submitted photo)
This king cake is made from brioche dough that is filled with cream cheese, espresso and cocoa powder and is topped with an espresso buttercream and cocoa powder.
You’ll find this Italian inspiration at Lilah’s Bakery in Shreveport.
This king cake has been offered for about four years now, and it’s become one of the bakery’s most popular king cakes.
Louisiana’s Mardi Gras season has kicked off with traditional masses and the northwest region’s first parade is next week. This means it’s also the season of the king cake – the decadent yearly indulgence of flour, sugar and butter.
Most bakeries have been behind the scenes, stocking up and preparing for the booming baking season in Louisiana.
Here’s what they’ve been up to and what bakers have planned for this year:
Photo Credit: Sharron Foster
Early preparation comes with little sleep. Sopan Tike starts baking at 6 a.m. and is home past midnight most days during the season.Husband and wife owners Sopan and Lisa Tike have been hard at work preparing for king cake season since November.
“There are even some days he sleeps in our van,” Lisa Tike said.
Sopan Tike can make up to 70 king cakes per batch at the peak of the season, and “we’re making five to seven batches every day,” he said.
Lisa Tike said year-round she and her husband operate the bakery by themselves but for Mardi Gras and king cake season they hire six to eight additional employees.
The Tikes’ secret to great king cakes: fresh everyday, and never frozen.
“Sometimes, during our busiest time of the season customers may get a king cake that is still warm because we bake them all day,” Lisa Tike said.
Lilah’s offers king cakes in four sizes ranging from mini to extra-large. The bakery offers 25 varieties.
No Mardi Gras party is complete without a fresh king cake from a local bakery like Lilah’s in Shreveport.
The boudin king cake craze has spread throughout Louisiana.
New Orleans, Shreveport, Port Barre and Lafayette bakeries are now producing their own versions of boudin king cakes, which have been selling faster than bakers can make them.
The social media frenzy brought the idea of boudin king cake to Lilah’s bakery in Shreveport. A customer offered to supply the boudin and cracklins necessary to make a king cake.
“We made it for her, and she loved it,” said the bakery’s co-owner Lisa Tike. “Then we asked for guinea pigs to taste test it for us.”
Friday, the bakery began taking orders for their boudin- and pepper jack cheese-stuffed king cakes that are topped with cane syrup and cracklin crumbs.
“My husband and I have talked about doing a more savory king cake for years,” Tike said. “It’s awesome that we were able to get in on this one.”
A popular new twist on a Mardi Gras favorite has made its way to Northwest Louisiana.
People have been going crazy for boudin king cake down in South Louisiana, after a Lafayette man’s boudin topped with crumbs and crackling and drizzled with Steen’s cane syrup went viral.
Now, the very Cajun concoction is available in Shreveport.
Lilah’s Bakery owner Lisa Tike says they started making the unusual king cakes after they got a request from a customer. “We had a customer come in and she said ‘I saw it on the internet and I love your king cakes, so I want you to make it for me.’ And my husband said ‘I would love to, but we’d have to make the boudin and the cracklins for it.’ And she said ‘I’ll go get you the boudin, I’ll get you the cracklins.’ We said ‘Ok, we’ve got the steen syrup and we’ve got it from there.'”
Tike says Lilah’s boudin king cake is made with the same dough as the regular king cake.
So far, they’ve already gotten more than 20 orders for the upcoming weekend.
Boudin king cakes can are still available by pre-order from Lilah’s in time for for Super Bowl Sunday, if you can get them in by 3 p.m. Saturday. Pickup will be Sunday 11-3.
They are $35 each for a cake that fits in a 10-inch box.
The popularity of king cake seems to have exploded during the last decade.
Bakeries and restaurants aren’t just filling king cakes with everything imaginable. They’ve begun offering king cake flavored products — king cake hamburger, anybody? — to people who seem eager to eat up king cake in any form possible.
“It just never ceases to amaze me just how many new king cake products there are this year,” says Poppy Tooker, producer and host of “Louisiana Eats” on National Public Radio. “It’s a blessed thing if it means that we are growing our king cake culture so much that we just can’t enjoy it enough.”
In addition to its traditional king cake, Lilah’s Bakery in Shreveport offers Mardi Gras bread pudding.
“It’s king-cake flavored bread pudding with praline sauce,” co-owner Lisa Tike said. “It’s really good. We don’t sell a whole lot compared to the number of king cakes we sell but people love it.”
Lila’s also has 25 different flavors of king cake. Tike said they also offer king cake cheesecake and king cake cupcakes.
“Cinnamon and cream cheese is the flavor of king cake that sells the most,” she said. “We have people all the time calling and asking for king cake cheesecake,” she said.
Lilah’s Deli & Bakery, which in the space of just a few years gained iconic status on Olive Street as a font of Mardi Gras King Cakes, has returned to its Highland neighborhood roots. Its new address is 1718 Centenary Boulevard, just north of Olive Street.
Just two weeks ago, owners Sopan “TK” Tike and Lisa Pliler Tike put the finishing touches on a former bank branch, insurance company and doctor’s office, completing a seven-month move from their intermediate location in the Louisiana Boardwalk.
Lilah’s – named after the Tike’s oldest child Lila, now 10, opened in 2006 but had to close in late 2011 after an electrical fire forced repairs that wound up taking five months, right through their key and profit-making King Cake season.
“We lost a lot of our business and couldn’t recover after that,” said Lisa Tike, a native Shreveporter who married TK in 2002. “At the same time we had opened our Boardwalk location about six months before the fire, so we decided to concentrate on that location.”
About a year later the couple added a catering truck to their operation, something they still operate, but they noticed they weren’t getting their Shreveport customers to come across Red River to patronize their Bossier City site.
“We found out most of our customers are local and they don’t go to the Boardwalk,” Lisa Tike said. “At the Boardwalk, it’s mostly tourist traffic and they are looking for the major franchises. So when our lease there was up, we started looking for a location to purchase. We didn’t own our Olive Street location and of course didn’t own our Boardwalk spot.”
They remembered putting $70,000-$80,000 into work on the Olive Street site – about three blocks west and just south of their new location at Wichita Street and Centenary Boulevard – that now is home to a vegan eatery.
“We wanted to find somnething where when we do all the work and put the kitchen in and make investment in, the investment is ours,” Lisa Tike said.
Head chef Sopan Tike, a graduate of the prestigious Institute of Hotel Management, Catering Technology and Applied Nutrition in Mumbai, India, has almost 24 years in the food industry. He worked three years and gained his initial pastry skills working at the five-star Taj Mahal Palace and Towers in Mumbai, and worked almost four years as a chef for Carnival Cruise Lines, working on the Carnival Destiny, Carnival Celebraion and Carnival Fantasy.
“I had a good time,” TK said.
He left Carnival in Miami, Florida, and worked in several places before coming to Shreveport in 1997 to work at a jewelry store owned by a friend. That store closed in 2000 and two years later TK and Lisa married. Not too much later, his bride asked a question he said was fateful and provocative.
“My wife said ‘Say, didn’t you say you wanted to open a bakery?’” he recalled. “So we opened the bakery.”
At first it was called Lila’s, but a bakery with the name sued the Tikes and they added the final H. Lisa Tike said that’s just fine, since the great-grandmother they named their daughter after actually did spell her name that way, they learned late.
The Tikes, who just returned from a three-week visit to India, are gearing up for the coming King Cake season and Mardi Gras. They’re are starting to gather the yeast, flour, sugars, creams and plastic babies needed.
“I’m expecting to bake and sell at least 12,000 King Cakes this year,” TK said, pointing to several large pouches that soon will gain company. “There are almost 5,000 babies in there.”
They even have an employee, baker Bruce Bletz.
“I absolutely love what I do,” Bletz said. “I just enjoy seeing the thing I make come out that other people enjoy. They tell you it was good, and that’s great.”
