Bolo Rei
King cake with candied fruit and nuts- Yield
- 1 large ring cake (about 16 servings)
- Active
- 1 hour
- Total
- 4 hours
- Difficulty
- Medium
The story
Bolo Rei, a ring-shaped cake decorated with candied fruit, traces its roots to Roman times—at the banquets of the Roman festival of Saturnalia, the “king of the feast” was chosen with a hidden dried fava bean—and it reached Portugal from France around 1870, by way of Lisbon's Confeitaria Nacional pastry shop. Traditionally a small trinket (sometimes an angel, sometimes a random object) was hidden in the dough and brought luck to its finder, along with a dried fava bean, whose discovery carries a less pleasant duty: whoever finds it must pay for the next Bolo Rei. Store-bought cakes today mostly leave both out for safety reasons, but in a cake baked at home this playful tradition is easy to keep. The cake is eaten from Christmas through Epiphany, January 6. For Portuguese families in the diaspora, the hunt for the trinket and the dread of the bean make for one of the most entertaining moments of the whole holiday season, as exciting for the adults as for the children.
This recipe contains alcohol. It is meant for adults of legal drinking age.
Ingredients and method
The full recipe, with US and metric measures and stand-ins for hard-to-find ingredients, is part of the Christmas edition. Buy it once and keep the PDF.
Want to try first? Rabanadas (Fatias Douradas) is free to cook.