On my recent trip to Vienna I got to experience what the Christmas capital of Europe (and maybe the world) had to offer. The holiday is a big deal in Vienna and everything is focused around dozens of holiday markets spread all over the city. Well as you can imagine these markets are full of sweet treats and Christmas surprises. For the next few days I'm going to highlight these sweet treats and maybe even convince you to make your way to Vienna next year for Christmas.
Yesterday I talked all about the baked goods available in the Vienna Christmas markets, today it's all about the candy. You may ask yourself why I'd wait till day 2 of my Vienna Christmas market blogs to focus on the candy, considering this is a candy blog. The reason is because I had to do the taste testing. I wanted to pick out the most unique treat to write about in this blog entry and it took me a while to pick it out.
While there are many great treats available in the Vienna Christmas markets, these strange cones really peeked my interest. For the most part it's because I had no idea exactly what they were. I saw a few people walking around with them, and it was mostly just young kids and older folks. When I saw other people eating these cones, I got the impression that they're filled with marshmallow. The thing is, it looked like really soft marshmallow and not like the store bought stuff you get for roasting.
After looking around for the best looking selection, I picked one up for myself. It was ridiculously light. In fact, it was so light I was doubting the idea that it was filled with marshmallow. If it was, it had to be a super light very airy marshmallow.
One bite into this cone and I realized that it wasn't marshmallow at all, it was meringue. This was a really pleasant surprise for me because I'm not a big marshmallow fan, but I love meringue. This meringue was a little thicker than most meringues I'm used to, but it was still very pleasant. This treat is a great way to enjoy a texture and flavour similar to that of ice cream, without the cold.
Best of all it was filled all the way to the bottom. I have to admit that near the end I was getting a little sick of the overly sweet flavour, but I persevered and really enjoyed it. While it was really tasty, I wonder if it could be improved with a little bit of flavoring. I'd be interested in trying a chocolate version of this, or even a fruity flavour.
While I enjoyed my meringue cone, Allison decided that she would go for some chocolate covered fruit. She decided to go for some chocolate covered grapes, because frankly it's not something you really see chocolate covered too often.
The juicy grapes worked really well with the smooth chocolate (I say this because she let me sample one). The flavour of the grapes worked well with the chocolate as well, which was surprising because I always thought that grapes had a really mild flavour compared to chocolate. The only disappointment for me was the fact that the grapes had seeds in them. I think a seedless variety would have work much better. The market had other varieties of chocolate covered fruit including strawberries, raspberries, and mangoes.
The Christmas markets of Vienna are really full of sweet treats. Most of the treats aren't that strange and not a single one was anything that would be shocking to a North American pallet. While we managed to find a few really creative treats, most are fairly simple. This isn't a bad thing, because these simple treats are all made fresh and with really high quality ingredients, so they taste great.
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