After taking the cake out of the box, I saw that the side of the box had two different “flavor” boxes checked. Yes, my friends, I had the ultimate kind of team #givemefillings king cake—a half & half! Half Bavarian cream and half cream cheese. Under these specific circumstances, this was both good news and not-so-good news. Good news because that’s two king cakes in one! And that is awesome. Not-so-good news because at this point I had already eaten three slices of king cake and now I obviously needed to have two more. This is the sacrifice I am making for you, reader. Please don’t ever say I never did anything for you.

Meche’s is apparently a Lafayette staple for donuts. And what I think is very cool about this king cake at the outset is that it is not trying to be anything it isn’t. It’s like, “Hey, y’all, I didn’t call myself a king cake. I’m a cake. From Meche’s Donut King. And I’m also a donut. I’m a Meche’s Donut King Cake!” And I respect that.

Let’s talk about the dough. This is a donut! I already told you that. THE CAKE already told you that. You may have seen a comment from me earlier on this, but I’m just not really a donut person. I like a donut as a vehicle for fillings—who’s surprised?. But I will pass on a glazed donut most days, simply because I have to somewhat prioritize my refined sugars (my blood sugar is laughing at me as I type this) and glazed donuts don’t rank very high for me personally. (I can feel some of you rolling your eyes and hating me right now. It’s okay if you disagree! We’re all different and that’s beautiful.) As far as donuts go, this one is delicious. It smells fried (in a good way). It smells like a donut shop. It is extremely dense. The bottom of a cake has a grid pattern that I recognized as donut-specific but don’t actually fully understand why, or even how I knew that. If you like donuts at all, you will love this dough.

The icing was, unfortunately, a little worse for the wear due to the FedEx box it was shipped in. But even after the wear and tear, there was still plenty of icing to be tasted, even without me having to scrape it off of the box and onto the cake. Based on the more photogenic depictions online, the icing is a relatively thin white sugar icing with glossy purple, green, and gold icing on top of that. Most of that survived transit but it did… look a little different. It was tasty but EXTREMELY sweet. Now, onto the fillings.

First, Bavarian cream. I haven’t had a Bavarian cream-filled king cake in a hot minute. I love Bavarian cream. What’s not to like? In my brain, it’s a cousin of the custard family. It’s smooth and creamy and not overly sweet. Y’all, I loved this Bavarian cream filling. It was everything I hoped it would be and more. Texturally and flavor wise, it was a really nice a balance against the fried, dense donut and the sugary icing. 4 stars.

Second, the cream cheese. I wanted to like this as much as the Bavarian cream, I really did. Y’all know by now how I feel about cream cheese. But this cream cheese was so sweet. Extremely sweet. Maximum sweet. With the icing (see notes above) it was too much for me. I’ll say that the slice I got had a lot of cream cheese AND a lot of icing, and maybe if I had tried a different slice with less of one, or the other, or both, it would have been a bit more balanced. Or maybe I would have enjoyed it more if hadn’t followed the Bavarian cream slice. Or PERHAPS I simply wouldn’t have felt so overwhelmed by the sugar if this hadn’t been the fifth slice of king cake I had consumed over the course of four hours. But if ifs and buts were candy and nuts… what a terrible idiom to use here. 3 stars.