The Three Kings arrived a little late...with the Rosca de Reyes!

The New Year continues on. For those who know the Christian Christmas story, January 6th, sometimes called little Christmas is the day the three kings visited the newborn child.  This is also the day of twelve drummers drumming, that is the twelfth and last day of Christmas. It is also called Epiphany.  On this date the Rosca de Reyes is traditionally served.  This is a king's cake similar to the one for Mardi Gras. From Wikipedia: Although the name indicates that it should be round, the “rosca de reyes” generally has an oval shape due to the need to make cakes larger than 30 cm across for larger parties. Recipes vary from country to country. For decoration, fig fruit, quinces, cherries or dried and candied fruits are used.

Time for a slightly delayed Rosca de Reyes!

The cake is consumed as part of the celebration of Epiphany or the "Día de Reyes" (literally "Kings' Day"), which commemorates the arrival of the three Magi or Wise Men. In most of Spain, Spanish America, and sometimes, Hispanic communities in the United States, this is the day when children traditionally get presents, which are attributed to the Three Wise Men (and not Santa Claus or Father Christmas). This actually makes more sense.

Historic representation of the Three Kings

And there they are on the box of the Rosca!

Similar to the Mardi Gras cake,  a small baby figurine is placed inside the cake. The tradition of placing this figurine, representative of the Christ Child, in the cake is very old. The baby Jesus hidden in the bread represents the flight of the Holy Family, fleeing from King Herod's evil plan to kill all babies that could be the prophesied messiah. (Did you know that?) Whoever finds the baby Jesus figurine is blessed and must take the figurine to the nearest church on February 2, Candlemas Day (Día de la Candelaria). We are told they are also supposed to throw a party in celebration.

Typically oval shape hiding a baby!

  I'm telling you all this because today we had a slightly delayed Rosca de Reyes for cake hour. This was brought back from Los Angeles by one or our newest PhDs who was visiting her family.  As this is part of her heritage she thoughtfully decided to share it all with us.  How very nice! So she schlepped back a large box from the San Antonio Bakery in Compton, California, a bakery that she has patronized with her family.  http://www.yelp.com/biz/san-antonio-bakery-compton

It's from my family bakery!

Proud of her bakery's treat!

We were happy to share in this tradition and enjoyed having the cake.  Despite the sugary topping, the cake itself was more of a slightly sweetened bread. It was a bit on the dry side which makes it good to go with coffee or tea.

Looks more like bread and tasted that way too!

The search for the babies is on. Each cuts his own!

At this particular bakery you can tell them how many of the babies you want added to the cake.  Our colleague asked them to include three.  In order to give everyone a shot at finding the baby each person has to cut their own piece.  We followed through on this and over the course of time we did indeed find three little pink babies in the cake. 

First cut and a bay is almost decapitated!

Our first baby finder. Does she look familiar?

Baby finder number 2.

A slight cut across the behind and the baby sticks to the knife.

The baby chills with a piece of cake.

It's getting pretty chopped up though there is another out there.

A final cut yields the missing child!

Look what I found!

The proud parent!

No more babies and just about gone.

No baby for me????

We wonder if this means we will be getting three parties on February 2nd?  Stay tuned!!

You got the babies now get to work on those parties!

Popcorn Day 3

Still got a ways to go!

The caramel seems to be the favored now!

Day 2 for Popcorn and pizza???

Day 2 of the popcorn. As you can see we have made some progress but it looks like it's going to last awhile.

The levels are going down!

Right now, the butter flavor seems to be favored!

Apparently the popcorn was insufficient for someone or they were having a late lunch and brought a pizza to cake hour!  Some people have no respect!

That's not the usual cake hour fare!

Hey, I'm hungry!

The Popcorn Factory provides a lot of corn..

Getting presents for the holidays is always exciting. Especially when something shows up at your door and you wonder what it is. Sometime, however, something shows up at your door and you know exactly what it is. That would be the case with the gift that we began sharing today.  When a big box shows up with the logo for the Popcorn Factory it's an easy guess as to what is inside. 

Hmm,what do you suppose is inside?

The holiday message on the yellow tells the source.

It's a big tin!

The message on the outside read "Happy Holidays, John Donahue." That being said it became even easier to imagine what was inside as we have seen this before.  Sure enough you open it up and inside is a large metal tin. Inside the tin are to be found three types of popcorn - butter, cheese and caramel. The logo advises us to "Celebrate Deliciously" and there is a circular assurance that despite any settling this is indeed fresh. Fortunately, it takes awhile for popcorn to go stale so even though this arrived in mid-December it was perfectly fine for the first week in January.  The popcorn is exactly as expected and taste wise is very reminiscent of the exact same stuff we got last year.

With this we are supposed to "Celebrate Deliciously!"

Take your pick!

This was gifted to a colleague who donated it for cake hour.  Given the size we assume no one would realistically expect one person to consume it so we were happy to dig in.  The pictures show the decline in the levels over several days. The caramel appears to be the favorite.  Even with some healthy appetites it will take a while to finish this off.  Thanks, John!!

Day after Christmas and here come the leftovers!

One thing about attending a lot of events during the holidays, you can be sure you'll be carrying stuff home.  One of the first events at Christmas yielded doggie bags with beef tenderloin, baked honey ham, Italian pastries and half a Stollen.  The beef and the ham are not appropriate for cake hour but the other two sure are.  So today was our first day for holiday leftovers or holiday treats courtesy of the brother and sister-in-law.

Nice mix of Italian pastries with bark thrown in.

Looks like an entire Stollen!

But it's not - only half!

The Italian pastries and cookies included the requisite cannolis, neapolitains, and glow in the dark colored cookies. There was some homemade white and dark chocolate bark thrown in for good measure.  The Stollen was half of a rum Stollen that was served at the celebration but did not get eaten.  All of these things were deemed perfectly acceptable by the folks at cake hour and consumed rather quickly. The pastries were fine, the Stollen we have had many times before and the bark was a nice sweet treat.

Goes great with coffee and keeps for a very long time!

We look forward to the next leftovers or Christmas presents that were intended for consumption.

The Glühwein flows again

We've made this a holiday tradition for cake hour. In effect we are bringing a German/Northern European tradition to Providence.  We serve up some spiced mulled wine known as Glühwein with appropriate Gebäck or baked goods.  In the past years I've managed to bring back baked goods from Germany but for the last few have not made it back.  However that did not deter us as we were able to find some appropriate goodies in Boston and combined with some homemade oatmeal chocolate chip cookies we put together a good selection to go with the wine.

Good spread for the day!

Commercially acquired Plätzchen..they were fine.

The Mother-in-law's famous oatmeal chocolate chip!

And a few other appropriate products from the store!

All set for a Glühwein cake hour!

Time to start serving!

This wine was prepared at home according to a great recipe that include a dash or amaretto and some rum.  We serve it up in a cup that is rimmed with sugar and garnish it with and orange slice.

The presentation!

Happy Holidays with Glühwein!

Puts a smile on my face!

This proves to be a popular way to serve it.  Several of our newer colleagues from China who had not had this before were very happy to give it a try as you can tell from the pictures.

And his.

Old and new Pediatric BFFs.

The commercial cookies laid out on the tray were adequate and visually approximated the Plätzchen or Christmas cookies that are ubiquitous in Germany during the holiday season. There was no comparison to the taste.  The homemade oatmeal chocolate chip cookies were a big hit and went very will with the Glühwein.  Because people seemed more interested in the drink we saved the Bahlsen Butter Leaves and the Anna's Swedish Ginger Thins for another day.   The most appropriate thing to have would be a Stollen, or traditional German Christmas Cake, but we could not find one this time around.  There will be plenty after Christmas, we suspect.

Sharing a last cake hour.

Very good!

Cheers from the guys!

These two have been around before.

This cake hour marked the final day of one of our graduate students now a full fledged PhD doctor.  For this we took our usual 10 second groupie!  (That's a selfie taken of a group.)

Farewell group for our newly minted PhD.