Today I am reviewing the Brennan’s Pink Parade king cake. As many of you (even those from outside of Louisiana) likely know, Brennan’s is a giant on the New Orleans fine-dining scene. Brennan’s is housed in a gorgeous pink building on Royal Street in the French Quarter, complete with a huge courtyard and multiple dining rooms. It’s a really, really cool place to eat. And Breakfast at Brennan’s (which involves a ton of alcohol, by the way) is a New Orleans institution.

This cake was a surprise from my colleague. He texted me one day recently to let me know he had dropped one of these on my desk to review.

The Pink Parade cake is a strawberry cream cheese-filled king cake made with fresh strawberry preserves from Ponchatoula (which is the strawberry capital of the world)!

My favorite thing about this king cake is its appearance. It seriously looks like something Dr. Seuss would come up with. If the Whos down in Whoville had a king cake, it would be this one. It’s over the top and GORGEOUS. In the words of Peggy Scott LaBorde, this cake is RESPLENDENT. It shimmers; it practically glows! The cake has a glaze and then a second icing on top of that. The second icing is bright pink. BRIGHT pink. And then, because why not, a third icing which is white and splayed across the cake in zig zags. The icing, which is pink cocoa butter, doesn’t really add any additional flavor to the cakes, but it sure does add a lot of pizazz. Finally, there is a ton of glitter on this cake which gives it a warm, shimmery, and glamorous appearance. There are also tiny “white sugar pebbles” on top of the cake. There weren’t very many of them, but I did like what it did for the texture.

The dough is extremely dense. My notes are as follows: “Dense dense dense. Heavy.” There is certainly a breadiness to it, but it also has a distinctly cake-like quality. Overall, I liked it a lot, but it wasn’t my favorite dough ever.

The filling is strawberry cream cheese and it’s lovely. It is strawberry and cream cheese blended together into a Chantilly-esqe filling. It reminds me of a really tasty strawberry smoothie. I wrote that down in my notes and immediately after, A colleague said that the filling reminded him of a strawberry banana smoothie. Great minds! I think that the reason this reminded both of us of a smoothie is that you can tell that it is made with real, fresh strawberries. That is a very good thing. My one gripe about this cake, which I’ve seen in many cakes this season, is that the shape of the cake was inconsistent which resulted in some slices with a ton of filling and some with not very much filling. Which is fine, I’ll just take the slice with all of the filling.

This cake has a teeeeny bit of a form-over-substance component to it, but it’s still super solid. 4 stars.