Pairing Beverages with King Cake

Eating your King cake is always going to be tasty and sweet and might contain fruit fillings and even cream cheese filling. Even the type of pastry dough might be more like French brioche, so you’ll need to know what the appropriate drink that goes with your King cake.

Matching the right drink for your King cake

Since every King cake is going to have a different taste profile, any drink that you try to match with these flavors might not go so well. When you’re pairing wine with any King cake, you’ll need to know which type of wine will bring out the right tastes that complement each other. Since every bite of cake will provide you with select flavors, your wine should be the perfect palette cleanser that cleans up and readies your taste buds for the next bite.

But to determine what will work with select flavors is what this article is going to help you with further so you won’t have clashing flavors. In addition to that, you’ll also want to enjoy a good wine that can be recommended for sweet or more subtle flavors that come from nuts, dried fruits, and of course almonds. Nutty desserts are often hard to pair with wine and can even ruin your King cake experience, and that’s why we’re here to help.

Which wine goes great with sweet dessert King cake?

Many of the Mardi Gras King cakes will be covered with sugary goodness that might give most people a toothache. Just so you can have a bit of rest in between bites, you’ll want a decent Sauvignon Blanc or Moscato. Alternatively, it won’t hurt to have sparkling wine sans brut to clear out all that sugar. Since most of these are recommended as dessert wines anyway, these will provide more enjoyment with sugary King cakes

Which wine goes great with almonds?

Almond is the staple of King cake and can be included with cream filling or with almond shavings or crumbled on top. Either way, you want to have a sparkling wine to bring out the density that almond tends to occupy in your mouth. Plan on grabbing light white wines, sparkling wines, and even Sparkling rose champagne. These are the best-recommended wines for French King cake with almonds.

Which wine goes great with cream cheese-filled King cake?

In comparison to trying to add a wine to cream cheese fillings, you want to avoid wine altogether. You want to stick with a pale lager beer which will help balance the cream cheese taste that adds just the right amount of malty, bread-like flavor to balance the sweetness of cream cheese fillings. This helps to mellow out and match the flavors more appropriately than most wines might otherwise destroy.

Which wine goes great with candied fruits?

As most of the King cake variants might have candied fruit on top, the majority of your cake is made from semolina flour rather than puff pastry. There might even be some nuts or almonds on that cake as well so you want to stick with sweet white and sparkling white wines. The cake itself will be much denser than puff pastry cakes, so you’ll be able to separate these flavors easier with refreshing white wines of your choice.

What if you don’t drink alcohol with King cake?

This is often a problem if you have kids at your Mardi Gras party and will need to serve something fun and bubbly. A great alternative that kids always love is non-alcoholic sparkling grape cider. There are varieties of kid’s champagne that come in all sorts of flavors, but obviously having light flavors such as grape or white grape is going to be the best choice to keep flavors from getting tarnished.

Most kids aren’t going to really care what flavor profiles are going to do for this sweet and fun dessert, but for adults who are probably driving home later, you can’t beat sparkling grape juices. In a pinch, you can also consider using grape soda, plain grape juice, and even light juices from a carton or from a bottle. It’s up to you to find which non-alcoholic drink will best match any alcohol drink that you serve with your King cake.

Will these wines match other food other than King cake?

Your party will likely have food that comes before the King cake itself, so you want to be careful what you pair with certain wines. To get the best flavors to go with specific wines, you want to check what meal you’re serving. The flavor of the wine will help to enhance and bring out the best flavor of an entre but might not pair well with King cake at all. You can check this guide to wine and food to see what wine goes well with your meal.

The same can be said about certain beers or lagers that go with your meal too, so don’t settle for Bud Light unless that’s your favorite choice… Aside from that, Mardi Gras parties are meant to bring together friends and family. Choose a cake that will closely match your dinner so you don’t need to juggle so much with changing different wines all night. This way you can stick to a flavor that will be suitable all evening or throughout the afternoon. Also check out our article on popular New Orleans cocktails.

How about serving coffee with King cake?

Funny that you might ask if there is a good coffee that matches the flavor of King cake? Coffee always goes great with cake in general but something as sweet as this sugary treat deserves a specific flavor profile too. You want to have a general full-bodied medium roast that isn’t too sharp on the tongue and isn’t so acidic either. This will work fine for sweet cakes but if you happen to enjoy cream cheese King cake you’ll want light-to-medium body coffee. You can also celebrate with some traditional New Orleans style coffees.

The same applies to anything that includes decaf if your guests don’t like the added caffeine. Don’t bother with tea, this isn’t the UK and certainly isn’t tea time’, you want to make Mardi Gras celebrations as welcoming as you can. Once you bring tea into a drink category, you’re asking for all sorts of flavor contradictions.