Patisserie Discoverie | Apfelstrudel

Patisseries - Vienna edition! Does that make it a viennoiserie ohohoho

I have just returned from the depths of Google and I have no answer. As you are by now very aware, I'm not qualified to categorize pastries in any category other than yum and blegh, and there aren't any bakers in this hostel that I know of, so we'll just have to live with not knowing. I know, life isn't fair. 

At the end of my walking tour in Vienna, I stopped at Cafe Central for a coffee break. This is where Freud and co. hung out way back when. I'm skeptical of all these "so-and-so hung out here" claims. I sometimes hang out in the downstairs common area of TDC, doesn't make it worth the trek. How many times does a famous person need to visit a place for it to claim that they hung out there?

My personal standard for strudel has long been that scene in Inglorious Basterds.

So tense. Much acting. Such pacing. But all I can focus on is the strudel. It looks so damn good. This strudel? This strudel was good. But it wasn't wait-for-the-cream good. Still, I can take heart in that the fumes of Freud's breath must have infused into the powdered sugar and elevated the strudel to the next level. Or something. This is how these things work, right?

But what do I know about Austrian cuisine? Is there even such a strudel out there? Or did I fabricate what one tastes like based on ten seconds of film?

Fun Fact! Strudel is derived from Middle High German for whirlpool. There's some appropriately ominous rock music coming out from the basement of this hostel right now. 

It's a layered pastry made of very thin dough, with a filling that can be either sweet or savory. The dough is wrapped around the filling until it has been used up. Apfelstrudel filling usually consists of apples (I should hope so), sugar, cinnamon, raisins, and bread crumbs. It is then sprinkled with powdered sugar and can be served with ice cream, custard, vanilla sauce, and yes, wait for it...cream. 

I don't know, guys. It was a great strudel, it was just shy of the strudel of my dreams. Does that strudel even exist? Or do I settle for ingesting Freud breath-fumes? Will I start obsessing over my father?

The only way to find the strudel of my dreams, I guess, is to eat more strudel until I do. 

Patisserie Discoverie | Apfelstrudel

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Patisserie Discoverie | Nid de Pâques

Happy Easter, everyone. 

I swear I walked into the boulangerie fully intending on buying the prettiest patisserie there. But, as in many a quirky rom-com, intrigue outweighed beauty and I went home with an open-faced box filled with brains.

Perhaps my craving for ramen has begun to cloud my judgment. Or the dream I had two days ago about worms taking over the world traumatized me more than I thought. Whatever the explanation, I can't believe I paid three euros for Justin Timberlake's hair from the 90s.

I should have seen the signs when the woman at the boulangerie walked around waving the box on its side, almost certainly smashing half the patisserie. ...Isn't half the price of a patisserie for the aesthetics? By the time I got home, it looked like someone had been overly enthusiastic about patting Justin on the head. He is a pop singer with a penchant for eight-minute-long loops of a single chorus, not a dog (seriously though, "what goes around comes around" - we should have known he was singing about song structure).

This patisserie just confuses me so much. It looks like off-color noodles, so my brain prepares for saltiness. And...noodles on cake? Is that a good idea? And then I think, what tool did they use to pile the noodles on like that? And then I think about how it's all really just a pile of cream that looks like separate strands of cream, but when you eat it it's just cream, and my mouth goes numb and I can't feel my tongue anymore.

At least the eggs make up for it by adding a spot of color to what otherwise looks like processed noodles, right? Wrong. The "eggs" are jellybeans with a hard candy shell, like the lovechild of jordan almonds and Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans no one asked for...and one of them was licorice, the one flavor that needs to disappear from the face of the earth.

I ended up eating all the jellybeans first to get them out of the way, because the mixture of jellybean and coffee cake was bizarre and way too sweet. May I suggest chocolate eggs next time? The cake itself was soggy coffee cake layered with cream and then topped off with a nest of cream (now there's a phrase I never thought I'd say). The creamy greasiness and the mouth-numbing sweetness with a hint of coffee overpowered my taste buds. And the almonds along the side added unwanted texture to the whole affair - now I know what it feels like to have a million tiny leaves in my mouth.

There are not many things I would avoid eating - licorice, bitter melon, fruits of unknown origin...but Nid de Pâques can now join that merry band of misfits. I'm not sure if I should apologize for it, because I'm afraid of anyone who takes pleasure in eating nest-like things and thus identifies with large rodents. Chinese people do eat actual nests, but I still feel slightly nauseous when I think about that time I had to pick feathers out of swallow's nest soup for three hours for my grandparents. Filial piety, man...

Patisserie Discoverie | Nid de Pâques

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Patisserie Discoverie | Carolo

Carolo sounds like a name I would give one of my Sims. It's a slippery slope, Carolo, because if you're not careful you could find yourself going Carololololololo...and so on for eternity. 

I hadn't heard of the Carolo until I found myself in Charleville-Mezières, a small city about an hour away from Reims, for a class project on municipal elections. A friend was kind enough to host me for the weekend while we went about interviewing candidates and taking photos of emptied storefronts, and twas she who made this patisserie known to me.

I let myself get a little too medieval there...

The Carolo is a specialty of the city, so special in fact that the only information I could find on it was on French Wiktionary:

"Specialité pâtissière de Charleville-Mezières."

Thank you for that, French Wiktionary. You're a true poet.

But I am not so easily defeated. From what I gather(ed from my taste buds and my friend's mom), it's a meringue-based cake, with cream filling. There must be nuts involved too, there are always nuts involved - probably the filling is hazelnut cream. It's always hazelnuts.

Continuing in the trend of questionably edible things, the Carolo looks like an adobe brick with stubble. I also couldn't cut through it, but it was for crumbly reasons (and not suspicious end-of-the-day reasons)! It was also very sweet, to the point where having one would probably cover any Carolo cravings for a couple of months. 

All this sounds very negative - it was honestly quite good, and I appreciate its strangeness and brickishness (in a dog-eat-dog world, a patisserie's got to survive by any means necessary, and camouflage seems like a practical way to go about that). It's hard to be surprised these days (quiet, inner eighty-year-old!) so the Carolo was exactly why I started this patisserie discovery thing in the first place. No, not to stuff my face, although that plays a part, but to see what else is out there. 

Patisserie Discoverie | Carolo

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Patisserie Discoverie | Paris Brest

I had been eyeing the Paris Brest for some time, actually. I recognized its name, but it was never photogenic enough to be chosen. Until today, when a friend and I walked past the boulangerie on our way home. 

At the end of the day, it was slim pickings. Few patisseries left, just a bunch of grease marks on an empty shelf. A framboise macaron with half its framboises missing. Two deformed chocolate eclairs that could actually have been one cancerous eclair. I contemplated coming back the next day. But then:

"What about the poop?"

So here we are.

I walked inside and waited as a mother paid for her baguette. Her blond baby cooed in his stroller. She took the baguette and stepped aside but did not move her baby.

The lady behind the counter made eyes at the baby. The baby looked at all the shiny colors in his new non-amniotic world. They stared at each other. After a good three minutes, they finally broke their gaze and the mother stepped in to wheel the baby away (although after that display of laser eyes I'm not sure he was a baby so much as an alien overlord hypnotizing his way through the human populace; I can only assume the mother was his accomplice).

"Un Paris Brest, s'il vous plaît," I said, pointing at the poop. Please take the prettier one please take the prettier one - my joy was short-lived, however, for when she placed her fingers on the poop not a single grain of powdered sugar moved.

I ate it anyway, because questionably edible food reminds me of home.

When I dug my spoon into it, it wouldn't move. I had to hold the poop down and wrestle my spoon into the top layer of choux pastry. It tried to slide and flip over. But worry not - ten minutes later, I was approximately 100 grams heavier. Just call me the poop wrangler (that was a terrible idea do not call me the poop wrangler).

The poop is basically praline cream sandwiched between two layers of choux pastry, and then garnished with sliced almonds and a dusting of (inexplicably immovable) powdered sugar. In fact, the Paris Brest was created by a pâtissier of Maison Lafitte to commemorate the Paris-Brest bicycle race. It's not in the shape of a poop, as we heathens call it, but rather a bicycle wheel (let us compromise in the spirit of world peace and settle on calling it a circle). 

Patisserie Discoverie | Paris Brest

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Patisserie Discoverie | Dôme aux biscuits roses

When in France...all anyone ever brings up is the food! Soon I'll have to leave all the deliciousness behind, but before I do, I'm going to stuff my face with as many different patisseries as I can from the local boulangerie in the name of cultural education.

Voilà, the "dome of pink biscuits." Sometimes you regret translating French, because all the fanciness evaporates and you end up feeling like you're about to eat a bald Candyland character.

Aside from champagne and the cathedral that never stops giving, Reims is famous for its biscuits roses. Depending on who you ask, they are either a charming regional specialty or compressed drywall.

So this is a...thing...made of biscuits roses. I will get better at describing food. For now I just start salivating and lose all linguistic faculty. Because between speaking and eating, I'd rather use my mouth for the latter.

Besides, the photos will tell you all you need to know...I mean, imagine if Proust had an Instagram.

Madeleines! #tasteslikechildhood #socrumbly #nom

And just like that, hundreds of French literature students would have the time to invent life-changing technologies or something. Imagine the progress! ...Do you ever think about how much we could get done if we stopped rewarding loquaciousness in academia?

Anyway, I was curious about what was inside. The outer shell is made of a gloopy pink gel that made me question its edibility. I accidentally touched the pastry several times taking it out of the box, but the gloop would just congeal and return to form. This patisserie is self-healing, guys. Plastic surgeons, look into this.

Was it gelatin? Was it cake? Was it a house of worship for fairies? 

One of the above. It's basically a spongy pink cake layered on a paper-thin biscuit rose crust, with a vanilla bean pudding on top. There are raspberries scattered throughout, as well as pockets of raspberry syrup. Finally, the whole thing is covered in a thick pink glaze and garnished with a raspberry and a piece of the famous biscuit. 

Despite the lack of praying fairies inside, I enjoyed it. I really liked the biscuit rose crust, which added a bit of crunch to each bite, as well as the pudding's strong vanilla flavor. Word of warning: it's quite sweet. As for the raspberries, well fruit already freaks me out a little and I don't know if you've noticed, but raspberries are hairy, so...I ate them but let's not talk too much about it.

Patisserie Discoverie | Dôme aux biscuits roses

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