Deliciousness

On my flight to the Frankfurt airport, I heard the flight attendants talking about this spread that is like peanut butter but tastes like speculatius cookies, which we love. Listening to them, I thought, they don't know what they are talking about, they probably think Nutella is this special spread. But today at the grocery store, while looking at the different hazelnut spreads, I found.... speculatius spread! As well as some other flavors, like coconut and pistachio. We think this will be killer on crepes, we're planning a crepe brunch party next Sunday. I'm also trying to calculate exactly how much of this stuff I can fit in my bag, and I'm glad I packed light. Oh, for your reading pleasure, a very short article about the market for this stuff in Belgium.

speculatius (speculoos, speculaas) spread

Here's another bit of deliciousness from Germany. Quark is a soft, fresh cheese, kind of in between yogurt and cream cheese. I only heard of quark last summer, so I've been looking for it here and so far been unsuccesful in finding plain quark, but I have found several flavors, like these two savory ones, and the plum/cinnamon holiday flavor as well as other fruity flavors.

red pepper and herbed quark spreads

Plum and cinnamon quark

Oh, and here's a little quark brotchen, it's kind of like a cream cheese danish, and I've eaten at least three of them already. We've gotten them from cheap self-serve bakeries for about 1 euro. I'm so impressed that even the cheap places like those bakeries have really good stuff. I wish there were more places like that in the States.

quark filled sweet bread

three of us with our quark breads

 This was quite possibly the best apple strudel I've ever had. Of course, most of the strudel I've had has been super cheap frozen grocery store variety when we were living in Vienna. So, yesterday morning we went out to a Viennese cafe for warm drinks and cakes, and some of use ordered strudel. It was obviously the best choice since there was a fight over the last few crumbs. The cakes and marzipan stollen look pretty good, but they didn't come with warm with warm vanilla sauce and whipped cream and currents. Yeah, I know, you wish you were here, right?

Viennese apfel strudel

chocolate/vanilla cake for the monkey, gluhwein cake with cherries, and stollen with marzipan for Lovemuffin