My Friend Randy Hates King Cake

Randy is a 58-year-old professional hairdresser at Clayton’s Hair Designs in Shreveport. He was a king of the local Mardi Gras in 2014, when he reigned as King Atlas VI. He is tall and broad-shouldered, with a handsome coiffure of white hair. If I were to point him out in a crowd and say that he was a Hall of Fame quarterback or a retired military general, you would say: “That’s what he looks like.”

Randy had a great 2020.

“COVID-19 notwithstanding, I had me a great year,” he says. Normally, he’d pause here to take a puff on a cigarette, but Randy no longer smokes. He quit smoking in 2020, after suffering a heart attack in late 2019. I resumed smoking in 2020, also after suffering.

I ask Randy how his heart is doing.

“My heart is operating beautifully,” he says. “I’m good for another 10 to 15 years, as long as I do everything right and don’t smoke and all of that crap.”

On the awful day when Randy does kick the bucket, his body should be studied by scientists for its incredible capacity to absorb and process butter. Randy is the Picasso of cooking with butter, and the recipe that you are about to read is his Guernica. 

“I died twice and came back. When you cheat death, like I did, something clicks in your mind,” he says. “You say: ‘I’m gonna start speaking my mind.’ I speak my mind now more than I ever did before my heart attack.”

These days, Randy Moulder will give you his unfiltered opinion on just about any topic. For example, he’ll tell you how he feels about king cake.

“I hate king cake,” he says. “There is nobody in this town that makes a king cake I like, as a rule. And the ones from New Orleans are even worse! It’s like dried-up, old coffee cake to me, overpriced and overhyped.”

The line goes quiet for a moment. I don’t know how to respond to the idea that king cake sucks. Randy jumps in to defuse the tension. 

“There I go again,” he says, with another puff-length pause. “Mr. Honesty over here.”

The reason for my call, of course, is Randy’s king cake recipe. So we are already off to a fascinating start. I ask Randy to tell me about the recipe. Where does it come from? Was it passed down by a family member?

“I cut this recipe 15 years ago out of the Shreveport Times,” Randy says. “It said ‘Easy king cake made with crescent rolls.’ I’ve tweaked it so many times over the years, to make it even better, that it hardly even bears a resemblance to the original. I’m a great cook.”

Randy’s improvisational riffs on crescent roll king cake may have gone unnoticed, if he hadn’t made 32 of them for his guests at the Krewe of Atlas’s masked ball. That’s Randy, for you: showing up in tails as King Atlas VI, the trunk of his Kia weighed down with crescent roll king cakes.

“My Queen found out about the cakes, then my Duchess found out about them, so I wound up putting those little cakes on every table,” he recalls. “That year, I made 140 or 160 of ‘em for the Captain of Captains. I made ‘em for the Harambee Ball for three years in a row.”

Randy’s king cakes became an enormous hit. If anyone had a problem with what they were—principally, two cans of artfully arranged, butter-flavored crescent rolls, covered in sugar and butter—no one let on.

“I was selling king cakes out of the back of the salon,” Randy says matter-of-factly, as if it were to be assumed. “I would take them with me to the bowling alley, someone would walk up and I’d sell them a king cake while I was bowling. Everyone who has ever tasted this king cake has become a believer.”

“You don’t have to tell me,” I tell him. “I’ve eaten it. I’m a believer.”

“Time after time, dozens of times, I’ve watched people’s countenance change the minute they put it in their mouths,” Randy says. “That’s very rewarding for me, to see that joy sweep over their face.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has reduced Randy’s income from hairdressing by about two-thirds, he says.

I ask Randy if it’d be okay, then, if I published his phone number in this story. Just in case anyone reading wants to order a crescent roll king cake.

“I wouldn’t mind having a few people who wanted me to make them a king cake,” he says. 

Randy sells his crescent roll king cakes for $30 each. If you’d prefer to let Randy do the cooking, you can text him at (318) 426-4119. The cake is available in a few flavors, including strawberry and blueberry.

But Randy would really love for you to make the cake for yourself at home.

“When you go out and buy this crummy-ass king cake that you’re not even going to like, you just cheated yourself out of the joy and sense of accomplishment of creating it yourself,” Randy says.

I thank Randy for his time and ask him if he’s got any advice for folks making his crescent roll king cake at home.

“Never do babies,” he says immediately, as though this is a thing that he frequently warns people about. “You don’t want to be sued for anybody chokin’ on a baby.” 

Randy Moulder’s Crescent Roll King Cake Recipe

The recipe that follows is an adaptation, with Randy’s notes, of the original “Easy, Delicious King Cake” recipe that ran in syndicated newspapers around the country in January of 2013. The ingredients list and measurements are from that recipe. The instructions include Randy’s notes. I am not certain that this recipe makes sense, but neither does the world that we live in.  

King Cake
2 8-ounce cans refrigerated crescent rolls per cake
4 ounces cream cheese (To make Randy’s version, use 16 ounces)
2 tablespoons powdered sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract (To make Randy’s version, use “one big tablespoon”)
2 Tbsp. butter, cut into cubes (Ha! To make Randy’s version, you will need at least 3 ½ sticks of butter)
1/3 cup light brown sugar
2 tsp. ground cinnamon 

Icing
1 Cup powdered sugar
1 to 2 Tbsp. milk 
1/2 tsp. Vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Spray a nine-inch pie pan with non-stick cooking spray.

Randy says: “Cover a pizza pan in foil and spray with butter-flavored cooking spray. Give it a generous spraying, now!”

Separate crescent rolls at perforations into 16 triangles. Place triangles, slightly overlapping, around the inside of the prepared pan with points pointing towards the center of the pan. Press seams together along the bottom of the pan only, leaving points unpressed.  

Randy says: “Open the crescent rolls one can at a time. Keep them cold for as long as possible. It can be the Wal-Mart brand. Get butter-flavored crescent rolls. Why wouldn’t you want butter flavoring? I like butter, butter, butter.”

Soften the cream cheese. In a mixing bowl, cream together softened cream cheese, vanilla and ground cinnamon until smooth. Spread cream cheese mixture evenly around the bottom of the pan, where the seams were pressed together. Randy does this step much differently.

Randy says: “My cream cheese is, you take two eight-ounce bars of cream cheese, and in a big bowl you add the cheese, one stick of butter, ground cinnamon, and a big tablespoon of vanilla. Put that in the microwave for 90 seconds, then whisk it or hand mix it back to a consistency of a creamy cream cheese.

“Take a spatula and slather half a stick of spreadable, room temperature butter for each cake. Just spreadable butter. Slather it! Then you take another spatula, and then you slather that cream cheese mixture around, just like you did the butter.”

Fold dough points over filling, and then fold bottoms of triangles over points, forming a circular roll. Bake in a preheated oven for about 30 minutes or until golden brown and baked thoroughly.

Randy says: “Before you put it in the oven, you gotta pinch all of the seams together so you don’t have a blowout and let all of your goodies escape.”

Combine all three icing ingredients in a bowl and mix well, only adding enough milk to create a thick, pour-able consistency like that of syrup. Pour evenly over cooled king cake.

If desired, sprinkle lightly with traditional Mardi Gras-colored sugar or sprinkles in purple, green and gold. You may have to make your own purple sugar using red and blue food coloring.

Finally, according to the original recipe, you hide a baby in the cake. According to Randy, you absolutely do not hide a baby in the cake.

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