Epiphany – or the Twelfth Day of Christmas – fell on a Wednesday this year – and during yet another snow storm.
I decided that we needed a little fun - so we made a King’s Cake.
It’s traditional in France to bake a cake and hide a trinket inside (usually a king figure). Whoever found the trinket in their cake would be the king of the party.
Well okay – so I’m not really French – but I took two years of it in high school – and it was cold and stormy and we needed a fun idea.
So – we found a basic chocolate cake recipe (you knew it was going to be chocolate – didn’t you!) and halved it. (We wanted to be sure to find the prizes that evening – not someday in the future when we finally finished off a big cake.)
Then we scrounged around for some prizes. We were kinda short on king trinkets – but I did come up with a key, a quarter, and a thimble. Then, since we wanted everyone to find a prize, we added 4 whole almonds.
The finder of the key would be the “key” to our evenings activities – they got to choose what we would do.
The finder of the thimble was excused from doing dishes that night.
Whoever found the quarter got to keep it – and anyone with an almond got to choose a treat from the “candy jar”.
We pushed the prizes in the cake batter before we baked it.
When the cake was cooled – we made a half batch of frosting and covered it up!
It sat in the middle of the table during our evening meal and created quite a bit of excitement!
When the meal was over my husband carefully cut the cake and handed out the pieces randomly.
Some of the kids took bites of their cake while others immediately started cutting it up with their forks to find the prize!
When it was over – we had finished off the entire cake and everyone had found a prize – except yours truly – I’m still not sure how that happened! 
But it did make one evening a little brighter in the middle of an increasingly long and snowy Iowa winter – and a new tradition was born.
