Food on Fridays: Time to Celebrate

In this week’s Food on Fridays post, it’s time to celebrate with some festival foods. For example, yesterday was Mutscheltag, “Mutschel Day in the nearby town of Reutlingen. Unfortunately, we didn’t know that until this morning, when Chris saw a reference to it in the local newspaper. Held on the Thursday after Epiphany, the celebrations apparently include playing dice games and eating Mutschel, a star-shaped bread.

Mutschel bread (photo from Wikimedia)

Mutschel bread (photo from Wikimedia)

Since we have tried the Mutschel in previous years, I wouldn’t have bought any even had I known it was Mutscheltag; they aren’t sweet, and  I find them  pretty tasteless, actually.

But the real reason to celebrate is that it is now official Carnival, aka Fasnet, season. Which means the Berliners (jelly-style doughnuts) in all flavors are back in the bakeries. As I have frequently commented, the bakeries around here don’t have Berliners all-year round; with a few exceptions for other feast days, the Berliners are available only in the period between January 1st and the start of Lent. This year Lent begins on Wednesday, March 5th, so there’s still plenty of time for you to come over here to Germany to sample them.

This year the Berliners have some competition, though, from a shop that opened up in Tübingen last fall. It’s a stand-alone Donut shop. Now before my local proofreader tells me to correct the spelling there, let me hasten to add that the name of the shop is Tasty Donuts & Coffee.

Tasty Donuts & Coffee shop, Tübingen

Tasty Donuts & Coffee shop, Tübingen

It’s a relatively new German chain that has a few outlets across Germany. Here in Germany, the English term “doughnut” seems to be used consistently to refer to a doughnut that is in the shape of a circle with a hold in the middle, topped with icing and/or decorations around the hole, as opposed to the filled-style of doughnut. This is not a typical German-style pastry, so perhaps that’s why the American unofficial spelling of “donut” was chosen for the name of the store and their offerings. In the rest of this post, I will refer to their products as donuts, rather than doughnuts.

Here’s a screenshot I took from their website that shows their wide variety of colorful offerings:

Tasty Donuts & Coffee shop donut list (photo from http://www.tastydonuts.de)

Tasty Donuts & Coffee shop donut list (photo from http://www.tastydonuts.de)

If you go to their website and read the German description of each of the types, you’ll see that some of these are actually filled, even though they have a hole in the middle. For example,  Schneeflocke, (“snowflake”) is a donut covered in powdered sugar filled with vanilla creme; the Schoko Loco (“crazy chocolate”) has a chocolate pudding filling with a white icing, and the Peanut Butter & Jelly donut has peanut-butter filling with a chocolate and marmalade icing.

On my visit there, one thing that struck me was that all the donuts sitting in the case were picture perfect. Truly. Uniform in size and shape, they were like models of what a donut should look like. Impressive. Not having the courage to start with one of those filled types, I decided to go for the basic, a chocolate-iced donut. That used to be my favorite type of doughnut; there was a bakery in Vancouver that years ago made a chocolate-iced donut that I could spend hours rhapsodizing about. Just perfect.

Unfortunately, the donut I tried at the Tasty Donut & Coffee shop didn’t live up to that memory, nor even to the name of the shop. Perhaps it was a little too picture perfect: it lacked any kind of taste, and was even a little chewy — and not in a good way. It tasted too much like the plastic model it looked appeared to be.

Ah well. So much for the promise of year-round availability of doughnuts in Tübingen. Probably just as well.

But until March 5th the Berliners are in town. Now that’s some tasty news to celebrate!


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Food on Fridays: Time to Celebrate — 2 Comments

  1. Pingback: Food on Fridays: NDD2016 and Beyond | Two together … wherever

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