Tricked

I am a firm believer of waiting for any Christmas celebrations until after Thanksgiving.  Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, with Christmas a close second.  So I don't want to mix the two.  I want to enjoy them each fully.  So I do not listen to Christmas music, buy gifts, or eat things that are Christmas things until Black Friday.

I found that I have been tricked into celebrating Christmas early here in Germany.  The first stands of Christmas candies first appeared mid-October.  I figured that they were not for Halloween, which they only kind of celebrate here, so I stayed away and ignored them.  But it turns out it is hard to stay away from things you don't know are related to any holiday.

Visiting Dresden in the German state of Saxony was where I made my first fall.  We were walking through an indoor market and looking at the sweets they were selling.  "Original Dresden Stollen" the one bakery claimed.  I am a sucker for original foods from a place.  I feel that they are important to try.  While there were many variations, I even bought the original kind (which just looks like bread).  At the other bakery they sold Baumkuchen. This literally translates to tree cake, so I was intrigued.  I asked in German (English is less common in Dresden than in Berlin) what Baumkuchen was.  She explained (and I was proud to understand) that it was vanilla cake and marmalade layers inside the chocolate outside.  I had not seen such a thing in Berlin, so I had to try it.  We were out sightseeing for the day, so I resisted buying them immediately and having them get squished as we wandered. When we stopped in at the end of the day, I bought them and I brought them both back to Berlin to eat.

Once in Berlin we opened them up to try them.  I sliced the Stollen and found that really it was a kind of fruit cake.  I was a little worried about this as some of the Stollen was sold in tins reminiscent of fruit cake.  However, this was more like fresh bread with actual fruit (not green and red jelly things).  It reminded me of Italian Panetonne in taste, but was looked a bit more like Irish Soda Bread.  I figured since I don't really eat fruit cake at all, eating it out of season wasn't too bad.

The Baumkuchen was like a giant donut, most like an Entenmann's Chocolate Frosted Donut.  The inside didn't really taste like jelly, it was just sweet.  It is layered very thinly, hence looking like the layers of a cut tree instead of a layered cake.  I found out later that it is a very long process to make Baumkuchen.  This was the winner of the two.  I was wondering if there were places in Berlin to get it.

I didn't have long to wonder.  A week or so later I was walking home and needed a snack.  I stopped at a bakery (which I am amazed I don't do more often) to get a cookie.  I noticed that they had Baumkuchen.  I knew I hadn't seen it there before.  I also noticed that the cookie options had changed some too.  I ordered what looked like a nice chocolatey one called Lebkuchen.  Once I bit into it while walking down the street, I realized why these things had suddenly appeared.  I was eating gingerbread!  It is fluffier and more like the texture of the frosted sugar cookies you get at the supermarkets in the US, but it was gingerbread.  It was strong enough that it even masked the wonderful chocolate coating that made me get this cookie.  This was when I realized I had been tricked into eating a Christmas cookie.  With Thanksgiving still a few weeks away.  And since Baumkuchen arrived to Berlin now too, it must also be a Christmas tradition.

Now that I know to be more careful, I have stayed away from anything I don't know.  Friends have started talking about their favorite holiday foods, but I will wait another two weeks to try it.   There is a Christmas Market that is already open, but I will wait.  Gluhwein (hot mulled wine, which I learned about in my German class when we talked about Christmas) was all over Prague and now is all over in Berlin too.  I am so excited for the Christmas Markets that will be all over Berlin, I am sure to be out surrounded by these things often in the upcoming weeks.

We will have to work on Thanksgiving here.  I plan to cook a nice turkey dinner on the Saturday after.  After that I will be ready for the Christmas Markets and food.  And I'm sure I won't run short on time to try any of it!

How to Make Berlin Look Expensive

Go to Prague!

Prague was one of the city's I felt like I missed while studying abroad in London.  I know you can only do so much in one semester, but it was one of the places I had hoped to get to, but didn't.  It was far and expensive to get there.

From Berlin, however, it is a different story.  It is four and a half hours away by car.  You can take a bus for 40 euros round trip.  On the bus you also get water, a snack, and wifi.  And you only need to be there 30 minutes before you leave.  You also get to see the country side between here and there, which looks a lot like Pennsylvania until you get into the Czech Republic.  So many benefits over flying.

When people talk about Prague they mention four things:  the beer, how pretty it is, how much they loved it, and that you must go.  Beyond that, I never had any idea what you would do there.  In other cities people talk about what things you do there, the Louvre, The Tower of London, the beach, the Kremlin.  It's always been odd that Prague doesn't have this, but only until you go.

Prague has many things to do.  The Prague Castle, which is still a working government building, but also has a number of museums that take about two days to go through.  The Charles Bridge with great views of the city.  The oldest working Astronomical Clock is there with a tower you can go up to view the city.  There are other museums, an opera house, marionette shows, and the largest night club in Eastern Europe.

But really it has this amazing sense of place that is hard to describe.  It really comes down to:  "It is beautiful, you must go!"  The city is one of the oldest in the area that has not had to be fully reconstructed due to war.  It is a place to wander aimlessly through the streets to see the architecture and the views of the city.

There are many wonderful cafes, restaurants, beer halls where you can sit and eat great food, great beer, and watch your surroundings.  Eating and drinking give you a sense of the Czech Republic : the hospitality and also something that represents no-nonsense.  Apparently many of the traditional Czech foods have been lost in time to communism, so much of the food is similar to most of Eastern Europe:  Goulash (which isn't really a stew, but more meat in gravy with dumplings to sop up the gravy), sausage, pork, and lots of potatoes.  If you stay away from the main touristy streets, you can also eat a full hot meal with meat and potatoes for about 5 euros.  The street food is fabulous as well!

Potatoes, Cabbage, and Pork

Fried Cheese with buttery potatoes with slab of butter.

Goulash

The Oldest

The Newest

And the beer is amazing.  Not only does it taste great, for the most part the beer costs about 1.50 euros.  Beer is usually the cheapest drink per volume you can get in Berlin, but it is still more than this!  Most places in Prague only sell two types:  light (not actually light but a pilsner) or dark.  The oldest beer hall in Prague, U Fleku only had one kind of beer.  What made this great was that when you sat down you were given a beer.  When your glass was empty they offered you another.  No need for language issues here, although really most people spoke English quite well.  We took a beer tour, which took us to the oldest microbrewery in Prague, the newest, and the most popular.  The tour was great because you had a half liter of beer at each place and you learned about the microbrewery and also about brewing beer.  We met some fun people on the tour as well.  A group of us went out after the tour to a bar called Propaganda.  It had a campy communist theme,which was hilarious to a group of American tourists.  (And one of the guys who worked there comes from the town we just moved from in the US!)

While in Prague, you must try Budweiser.  It is a traditional Czech beer that is not related to the American beer of the same name.  In fact they are in legal battles over the name.  It also comes in light or dark as seen below. 

 
Our last day in Prague was a rainy day.  We had seem most of the things we wanted and really only had half a day before we caught the bus.  We did some shopping as we had noticed that we could buy cheap shoes and I really needed some.  I bought two pairs of mary janes and one pair of winter boots for a total of 45 euros!

If you are looking to move to Europe but don't know where, think about Prague.  It is beautiful.  They speak English.  The food and beer is good.  Things are cheaper than in most of Europe.  And it is still an international city where there are many things going on.  I personally am not ready to move again, but it crossed my mind while we were there.  And if you aren't looking to move, at least go for a visit.  It is well worth the trip.

Is it Pumpkin or Squash?

One Saturday in October we were heading to Cafe BilderBuch on Akazienstrasse to have breakfast and do some work.  What we found was Akazienstrasse blocked off to cars and vendors setting up and a very full cafe with no open seats. 

We had found the Schöneberg Kürbis Fest.  Kürbis is pumpkin in German (as a noun it is capitalized throughout this post as all nouns are always capitalized in German).  Important to note is that there is no separate word for squash in German, so Kürbis also means squash.  They distinguish between types you can eat and not by putting the word Speise (food) in front of those you can eat.  We were there just as the festival was beginning, so we walked through but moved on to find somewhere else for breakfast.

Sunday we headed over to see what the festival had to offer for lunch as festivals always have fun food stands.  We were not disappointed.  Our strategy for trying different things is to only get one of any one thing and share so we can try more things.  It's the best way.  The first stand that called to us offered a variety of pickles.  We had a garlic pickle as we continued to walk the crowded street. 
Next we tried a spicy Kürbis soup from an African food stand.  This is one of the things that I most wanted to try from our walk through the day before so we waited on the line for it.  The soup was excellent.  Not too spicy to cover the flavor, but enough kick to really add something to the soup.  We still have no idea if it was pumpkin or squash as they taste similar enough and the sign saying Kürbis doesn't help.

Berlin is big on being green.  Instead of using disposable bowls, you got the soup in nice heavy bowls.  You have to pay 2 extra Euros which you get back once you return the bowl to make sure people don't take them home but so you can walk around with the bowl.  A good system really.

We then wandered around past crepe stands (the kid one has gummy bears and chocolate sauce), wooden furniture for sale, marzipan and nougat stands, a mini-ferris wheel, all types of crafts, the electric companies trying to get people to switch to them (since here you can pick who is your provider even as an individual in an apartment building) and of course pumpkins.

Ready for something more to try we headed to the stand with a sign saying they had old Bohemian Kuchen (loosely translates to cake but is used to mean many dessert-y things or cake-like breads).  We really had no idea what we were on line for.  As we got closer though we saw that the reason it took so long was because they were making the pastry and giving them straight out of the oven/grill and only two were ready at a time.  At this stand the dessert (seen here) was called  Feuerkringel or fire curl.  We found this in Prague (which is in Bohemia) where it is called Trdelnik.  They take a snake of dough and wrap it around a metal rolling pin.  They put another one on the other end. Then they roll it so that it is the dough becomes two separate rolls around the pin.  The rolling pin goes in a special grill that lets them rotate as they cook.  When they were just browned they take them out and roll them in cinnamon and sugar and slivered almonds and give it immediately to the waiting customer.  It was worth the wait.  It was a bit like a sweet bread.  The dough itself was not sweet, but the sugary outside made the whole thing sweet since it was so thin. 

Before getting pumpkins we decided to get a Wurst to split.   While on line we realized that they had a line of different types of mustard to try on the Wurst of your choice.  In the end we each got our own because there were about 10 types of mustard and they wouldn't have fit on half a Wurst.  Actually they didn't all fit on one.  They were so good though:  garlic, wild garlic, hot, horseradish, sweet, tomato, standard to name a few.  And no yellow mustard in sight.  While I am not he biggest fan of sausage, I do love mustard.

No pumpkin fest would be complete without buying some pumpkins.  We went to one of the farm stands that was taking over the whole front courtyard of the church selling pumpkins and squash.  It was interesting to see pumpkins we had never seen before, like the watermelon pumpkin.  We bought a what we called a Zombie pumpkin but is apparently as Blue Hokkaido Pumpkin.  The types that you can eat (which you can with this one) were all cheaper than the Halloween pumpkins (yes, that is what they called the regular orange ones here).  However, we will leave our Zombie pumpkin as is.  Although it may end up with a marker face by Tuesday.

What Happens When Our Apartment is Furnished

Notice that the last post was in September.  That was about the time we finished furnishing our apartment.  So now we have time to go out and do things.  Hence the lack of blogging but more interesting things to post.  I will now take you back in time to the beginning of October.

October 3rd is German Unity Day celebrating German unification on October 3, 1990.  I was told that while we had off from school there would be no parades or fireworks ("This is not America," a Berliner told me). 

We started our celebration of German Unity and the three day weekend (and our apartment being furnished) by having our first dinner party.  We made chili and cornbread, which I suppose was not in the theme of the weekend, but went over well anyway.  The obstacles of this party were getting all of the cans of things home without a car (I started going every day that week and picking up a few cans at a time), having to make cornbread with no help from Jiffy, dealing with the only icing option really being chocolate glaze (unless you go to a specialty store and pay a lot) and melting your own caramel if you want to use any.  In the end it all worked out, though.

To continue our weekend we went on Sunday to Brandenburger Tor for the Festival of Happiness.  Officially it was the Coca-Cola Festival of Happiness.  The American company logo all over the area celebrating German Unity was quite funny.  The festival was a big concert at the back of Brandenburger Tor.  The stage was at the Gate and the festival with food and stuff stands, rides, and screens to see the concert continued down the street though the Tiergarten. 

We arrived on the wrong side of the Gate for the festival at first and because the stage was blocking it we were afraid that we wouldn't be able to get through at first.  Not a good way to promote German Unity if we couldn't get from East to West Berlin.  We were happy to find that they didn't make this mistake--we just hadn't noticed the way around.

After listening to the band for a bit we wandered all of the stands.  It was a beautiful, warm day out.  It seemed more like summer than October.  It is fun to see what kinds of foods different places sell at festivals.  There was more beer and wurst than we are used to at home.  Also wine and wine with fruit in it.  There were also a variety of ethnic food stands selling things, but not as many as you see in general in Germany.  Cotton candy and candy apples reminded me of fairs at home.  Marzipan and the number of types of nuts were new things at a fair for me. 

The best part about the festival's location was that if you got tired of walking through the crowds you could wander off into the park and sit for a while.  We took some of these nice strawberry-wine-with-strawberries drinks with us.

We wandered back through the stands for some wurst and beer for dinner.  While there the screens from the stage started showing us these people who seemed to be trying to teach us some dance moves.  The dance was somehow reminiscent of Kris Kross, but not quite.  Then the band came on: Culcha Candela.  Once they started singing and dancing it was clear that this was a boy band with the band members being older than 30.  At first we just couldn't stop watching because the whole thing seemed so absurd.  Then it sucked us in and became fun.  We discovered the dance moves they were teaching were for the band and tons of festival goers were dancing in unison.  Wow!  I think that all unification days should include mass groups of people learning a new dance together.

As no band could top this one, and the sun had been down for long enough to make it get colder, we headed home.  We may have missed the last weekend of the Munchen Beer Fest, but we can say that we participated in the German Unity Day celebrations (and there is always next year).

Baking in Berlin: Attempt #1

I usually do a lot of baking and cooking over the summer but didn't really have much time with our move to Berlin. So after not baking for over two months, it was time. We were going to a friend's place for dinner which gave me the perfect excuse.  I wanted to bake something I knew well and something easy as we were pretty busy that day.  So I went to an old standby that I know from memory:  Chocolate Cherry One-Pan Cake.  However, I couldn't find almost any of the items I needed, so I had to make do with some substitutions.  It didn't come out at all like what I normally make, but was still pretty good.  I've listed the recipes here.

Original Version (I don't recall where I go the recipe from originally, and I have made some alterations to it.)

Berlin Version

1 can cherry pie filling 1 can strawberry pie filling 1/4 cup sugar 1 bag chocolate chips 1 dark choc. cake mix butter Grease bottom of 9x13 pan. Pour in pie filling.  Sprinkle sugar over top.  Pour chocolate chips over sugar.  Pour dry cake mix over the chips.  Slice butter into thin pats and put across the top.  Bake at 350° F.  After ten minutes check and make sure butter covers the top.  Add more if needed.  Bake for another 20-30 minutes until it looks set and is bubbly on the sides.

1 jar of pitted cherries 1 jar of Rote Grutze (berry compote) 1/4 cup sugar 1 box of French chocolate torte mix (because it was the only one that didn't need to have milk added so it was the most like what I've used before) butter Grease bottom of larger, thinner pan.  Pour in Rote Grutze and cherries (without the juice).  Sprinkle sugar over the top.  Pour dry cake mix over the sugar next.  Slice butter into thin pats and put across the top.  Bake at 180°C.  After ten minutes check and make sure butter covers the top.  Add more if needed.  Bake for another 20-30 minutes until it looks set and is bubbly on the sides.

Berlin Version- cross section so you can see the lack of layers

This cake was much thinner than I am used to, even taking into account the larger pan size.  Apparently the chocolate chips (I didn't see any and only later thought about getting chocolate and chopping it myself) keep the layers separated a bit.  This cake became one thin chocolate cherry mush instead of a layer cake. Final verdict: good, but not the same.

Small Town Berlin

The Spree

Berlin has about 3.5 million people.  When it takes 45 minutes to get halfway across the city, I count that as big.  A bit bigger than where we moved from (maybe more than a bit).  However, I find that Berlin sometimes feels like a smaller place. 

For one, things close here on Sunday. It is hard to find a grocery store or any shopping that is open on Sunday.  I thought that it was rough in the South, but Berlin wins.  However, they aren't opposed to voting on Sundays apparently.  It's not so much a day to go to church as a family day.

What I have found more striking is that I run into people I know.  I have twice run into a man from T's work on the U-Bahn.  Of course we all work near the same stop, but I don't leave work on any schedule.  The other day on the way to work I passed a colleague who was biking to work (I was walking to the U-Bahn).  I didn't even know she lived near me.  And later that same morning I sat on the U-Bahn right across from a different colleague.  That puts my count of running into people commuting to work at 6.  Again, we are all going to the same place, but for the most part we are coming from different directions and at different times.  The craziest instance of how small Berlin feels is when I came to our courtyard and heard someone yell "Hello."  No one else was near me, so I looked although I didn't know who they may be talking to.  It was a woman who works at a cafe near where I was taking German classes before work started.  I had been in several times.  It is a 30 minute train ride away.  Apparently we're neighbors.

I imagine big cities like Berlin to feel big.  Like you won't know anyone unless you are going to a specific place or meeting someone.  I sort of like that it can feel small here sometimes.  We are working on spending time at our favorite cafes to be regulars and this will make Berlin feel like a small town as well.  But that is all in our little section of the city and not as we travel across it.

Or maybe it's that the people we know in Berlin are just so similar to us.  I mean, we did run into friends of ours from Berlin in a restaurant in Baltimore, a city none of us should really have even been in!

Not Just Ice Cream

This was one slice (ein stück) that I cut into 2. 

I feel that I am letting those cake-over-ice-cream-eaters down if I don't mention some about the cakes here.  Afternoon is not only ice cream time.  It can also be cake and coffee time.  Can't really go wrong with either choice in my book.

The cakes here can be huge.  I am not one to share a piece of cake.  In the US, it may happen because I made the mistake of eating too much at dinner.  Here it is because sometimes there is just no way.

I haven't seen anything like what we call German Chocolate Cake.  Which is a little sad, because chocolate and coconut are so good together.  I was happy to find Schwarzwald Kuche though (Black Forest Cake).  As you can see in the picture it was a good size portion, but it was so much lighter than what I'm used to that I was able to eat it.  Notice how thin the cake layers are and that it's cream not icing in between.  Also note the raspberry cream cake in the back. 


I feel that there is a lot of cake exploring to do.  So many types to try.  So many things to learn for baking purposes.  Yes, of course, it is just for research to tell you and for expanding my baking repertoire that I will do this!

Be a Berliner, have some cake and coffee today!