Eating cake in Budapest

Every year in December my husband and I try to spend a long weekend in a new European city. There are always good flight deals in the weeks leading up to Christmas, and though the weather can be chilly, it's usually a fun time to be out and about because the holiday season not only lightens everyone's mood but also ensures that you'll have some pretty decorations to look at.

This year we went to Budapest, Hungary. Budapest is a very large, beautiful city with amazing architecture. We went to Vienna, Austria, a few years back and you can definitely see the Austrian Habsburg influence on some of Budapest's most prominent buildings.

On our second day, we awoke to discover that it had snowed heavily overnight, blanketing the city and causing the airport to close. It was all very beautiful but also very cold, which gave us the perfect excuse to take refuge in cafés in between our visits to the sites. I love coffee and cake and Budapest did not disappoint. Here are some of the local specialties that we tried:

- small individual cakes: the cake with the white tree on top was chocolate with a hazelnut filling, the one with the yellow bell was chocolate with coconut and the cake decorated with holly was actually two hazelnut cookies sandwiched together with berry preserves (it tasted a bit like a linzertorte).

- Dobos torte: a well-known Hungarian speciality made up of multiple layers of sponge cake and chocolate buttercream, topped with caramelized sugar

- Gerbeaud "Valrhona" torte: chocolate cake with chocolate filling / icing, flavored with candied apricot (my favorite of them all) (the second dessert in the picture is an apple strudel)

We enjoyed both the Dobos torte and the Valrhona torte at a Budapest institution, Gerbeaud cafe. This cafe was very elegant and reminded me of some of the coffee / cake shops we went to in Vienna. They were out of the sachertorte on the days we went or else I probably would've forced down a slice of that too...

- kurtoskalacs: a Hungarian pastry that tastes like a sweet, thin but dense bread and comes in a hallowed-cylinder form (we bought the cinnamon and sugar flavored version)

- Gundel palacsinta: yet another Hungarian specialty, these are crepe-like pancakes filled with ground nuts, dried fruit, cinnamon and rum and topped with chocolate sauce and powdered sugar

Wow, only in doing this post did I realize how much pastry we consumed over the course of four days. We did a lot of sight-seeing too, I promise!

Comments

[Karin]

You guys have the best holiday tradition EVER! Love the pictures (I think I drooled a little, sorry)!