Three Kings Day/Dreikönigstag
Today is Three Kings Day (it is also the 12th day of Christmas), also known as The Epiphany. Three Kings Day commemorates the Biblical story of the three kings (Melchior, Caspar and Balthazar) who followed the star of Bethlehem to bring gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh to the Christ child.
In Switzerland, Three Kings Day is celbrated with a Dreikönigsküchen.
Baked into one of the six outer buns is a tiny plastic king.
Whoever picks the bun with the king wins the crown and gets to be king for a day. According to R there's a trick to finding the king: because the plastic king is inserted into the cake before baking, the dough falls a little bit, so it's usually the smallest of the six outer buns that holds the king. I personally use this knowledge to avoid the king, because whoever wins the crown is supposed to wear the crown and I try to avoid being the center of attention even in such silly circumstances.
Fortunately Small Boy suffers from no such false modesty.
The cake is mildly sweet, with raisins and almond shavings, and Small Boy seemed to like it. It's one of R's favorites.
[Apparantly they have an entirely different cake in French Switzerland, which doesn't surprise me because French Swiss and German Swiss go out of their way to distinguish themselves from one another (unless they are about to be confused with actual French or actual Germans, in which case they all Swiss up pretty fast, the German-speaking Swiss especially).]
Labels: Schweizermacher
4 Comments:
I saw on "Emeril Live" (Food TV Network show) that in New Orleans, they do a similar thing except it's a small solid plastic baby doll or a bean.
3 King's Day is very big here in the Hispanic culture.
Hi! :-) I've heard about hiding a bean before, but didn't know about the plastic king. The kuchen sounds like my kind of thing since it's not too sweet-- maybe I'll try to do something like that next year.
Three Kings Day is celebrated in Belgium as well but I always forgot about it until the musicians knocked on my door. They brought their instruments along and were actually very good! But many of the neighbors gave them a glass of dark beer to celebrate, so they got progressively more "joyous" as the day wore on. ;-)
I've never heard of 3 kings day, that's interesting! And Small Boy is so cute!!!
I got to be king too! well, queen anyway!! :-)
Wishing you a wonderful New Year!
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