Today in Food on Fridays we’re back in the cake shop in Weil der Stadt to talk about the cake I actually ate there, the Donauwelle, literally the “Donau wave.”

You see, it occurred to me that that I have mentioned the Olgabretzel a bunch over the past week — but I actually didn’t eat one of those when we went to that cake shope. True, I tasted one, but I that’s not what I ordered there. So it seemed only fitting to actually post about something I did eat.

First, I think it’s worth a mention that having an afternoon Kaffee und Kuchen (“coffee and cake”) break at a Konditorei (cake bakery/cafe) is supposed to be a traditional German thing.  However, it’s not all that traditional in Tübingen nowadays, if it ever was. In fact,  there’s only one place in town that can really be called a Konditorei, as opposed to a regular bread and pastry bakery. That’s probably the reason I haven’t blogged much about the cakes here in Germany on the blog; I just did a search and noticed that I’ve talked only once about any type of Kuchen in the nearly 3 years we’ve been in Tübingen

Regular bakeries have doughnuts, BTW. We have lots of those in Tübingen, as I’m sure you’ve guess based on the number of posts I’ve written on that topic.

Anyway, there we were in Weil der Stadt, having just visited the Kepler museum, and it was time to take a break and have some coffee and cake.  Conveniently, there was a Konditorei across the street City Hall. There were no signs on any of the cakes on display, so I asked what one thing was, and the clerk said it was a Donauwelle cake.  Which made sense to our friends, but I had no idea what that was.

I need to get out more, or at least get into more Konditoreien, I guess, as I later learned that the Donauwelle is a particularly popular cake in Germany.

So even though I wasn’t familiar with it, it was described as a marble pound cake, with some cherries in the mix, all topped with a chocolate icing. That sounded good to me. So, I got a piece.

Donauwelle cake, at a Weil der Stadt Konditorei

It was pretty good; the one surprise was the icing, as it was hard. It was more like melted chocolate than creamy icing, so it sort of cracked into pieces as you cut into it (see above in the photo, there’s a piece of the chocolate sticking up).  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.  Quite tasty as a cake;  it’s probably for the best that there aren’t a lot of Konditoreien in Tübingen, so I’m not tempted by these things too often.

Anyway, in looking the name up on the Internet when we got back, the name was described as a two-word compound:

Donau – the German name for what’s called in English the Danube River
Welle – the word for “wave”

The Wikipedia article about the cake talks about the name coming from the idea that this is a sheet cake, with the icing on it is supposedly evocative of “waves on the Donau.”

Or, it says, perhaps the name came later, because the cake is particularly popular at towns that are all along the Donau river.

Hmm, that seems like a convenient after-the-fact, “back-formation” explanation of the name to me.  In mean, in the following photo of the whole cake that I got from Wikipedia, even though it’s markedly different looking on top than the one I had, I still fail to see anything that evokes the idea of a wave. Swirls, yes. Waves, well, not so much:

(Photo by Hannes Grobe; Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons.)

I mean, this is what I call a wave:

“Sudden Surge, Melbourne, FL, 2007”

Ah well. It’s hard to get the look of the waves on the Atlantic ocean in a cake.

But whatever the origin/meaning of the name, if you get a chance to eat a piece of Donauwelle cake,  I highly recommend it.

*****

BTW, when I decided to blog about this piece of cake this afternoon, it started as just a logical way to end a week of blog posts about Weil der Stadt. However, when I realized the story about the name, it gave me a reason to include my photo of the waves in the ocean at the beach in Melbourne, Florida.

And that photo just happens to be the photo on my latest pillow/tote bag creation on Red Bubble. Now, if I was better at marketing I would have thought of this shameless tie-in before I started writing the post, but really, I didn’t.  This is why I’m hopeless at marketing – I miss the obvious connections.

But that won’t stop me from adding a link here to take you over to my Red Bubble shop to see all my bags, pillows, etc. that are for sale, including the one with the wave.  Buy before September 2 and you can get a 15% discount with the code GET15.

After all, what better way to celebrate the end of summer than to take a bit of the beach home with you, to enjoy in your house all year round. 😉