Mardi Gras season means purple, green, and gold beads, parades, parties, good food, and good fun. And the icing on the cake is celebrating with the purple, green and gold-iced sweet king cake. For one locally owned Shreveport bakery, king cake has been the ingredient for a successful business.
This year, Lowder’s Baking Company has made thousands of their beloved King cakes since the start of the season.
Sarah Lowder is the co-owner of Lowder’s. She says she and her husband, Preston Lowder, began baking king cakes years ago in their own kitchen for their family and friends. Over time their cakes gained popularity, and when one Mardi Gras season resulted in 500 king cakes made, the Lowders decided it was time to start their own bakery.
"We decided to put a business plan together, and we quit our jobs and opened up Lowder Baking Company, our storefront, in January 2019."
The Lowders are Shreveport natives, neither of whom have a background in baking cakes. Sarah Lowder was in real estate and finance, and Preston Lowder was a neurosurgical ICU nurse. Now, the couple’s company is very successful, selling breakfast sandwiches, cookies, fresh bread, and pastries.
Only during the Mardi Gras season, starting on January 6 through Mardi Gras Day, does the couple sell their locally famous king cakes. Sarah says that this year was the first to bring them over 10,000 king cake sales, which begs the question, what makes their king cake so special?
"We don’t take shortcuts. It’s really something that, you know, we want to make it from scratch using real high-quality ingredients, the right way, with no shortcuts," Sarah says.
"We really wanted that dough to be light and airy, but still able to hold a filling inside of it. And, we put a lot of focus on our bread quality, our dough quality," she says. "The recipe that we have is really just a self-taught recipe done by a lot of trial and error. Just, a lot of iterations over and over until we really got it to where we wanted to."
This year, the company celebrated its six-year anniversary in January. Lowder says that their first year selling king cakes from the bakery was more successful than they could have anticipated.
"We, kind of, tried to put numbers or projections in those first couple months that we would be open, before we opened. And we surpassed that pretty quickly, a lot quicker than we expected," she says. "I would have never thought we would be where we are now six years ago. We’re really grateful to be able to be growing and to continue to grow."
Sarah Lowder says that even though they are usually busy during the Mardi Gras season, they try to celebrate the holiday by attending Shreveport’s parades as a family. Since Mardi Gras is a big part of their lives and their city, Sarah says she has a deep appreciation for the season.
"I think people love Mardi Gras, it’s such a source of pride in our state, and just our Louisiana traditions. I think we’ve seen a huge growth since we started making king cake cakes, even until now," Sarah says. "There’s some cool things popping up."
Making thousands of king cakes can bring some king cake fatigue for the Lowders, but Sarah says they still have their personal favorites.
"I really like our traditional–just our brown sugar cinnamon, kind of, just the simplicity of it," Lowder says. "Preston’s favorite: he goes back and forth between our strawberries and cream and our pecan pralines and cream. I think if you were probably to ask him today, he’d be leaning towards pecan pralines and cream."
Sarah also says she likes their new dark chocolate ganache king cake. According to Sarah, this flavor has taken a few years to perfect, since baking can be a really technical and scientific process.
"That’s really Preston’s strength. When we bake, we have such exact measurements that we weigh out every ingredient. It’s not something that we can just add a little dash here, and a little dash there."
Sarah Lowder emphasizes how grateful she is for the community’s support for their business.
With Red River Radio News, I’m Alaina Atnip.