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“Lebkuchen” will get translated from German as “gingerbread,” however that’s not fairly proper. The phrase “gingerbread” units expectations for it being the type of stuff you’d construct a home out of, although that selection does get utilized in edible structure.
There are additionally these ubiquitous gingerbread hearts, adorned in icing sugar along with your sweetheart’s title and a swooping script that claims “Ich liebe dich” — I like you — or perhaps simply “Greetings from this twee Germanic city.”
The stuff used to ship messages or act as culinary sheetrock is all high-quality and nicely. However extra attention-grabbing is a cakey kind of cookie filled with honey and spices and baked on prime of what’s basically a communion wafer — in a lot earlier days, baking gingerbread was the provenance of nuns they usually discovered {that a} communion wafer saved the cookies from sticking to the pan.
This fashion of “lebkuchen” is translated extra actually as “honey cake.” An identical batter is baked into little brick shapes, layered with jam, iced with chocolate, and topped with candied fruit. That configuration comes layered with nougat, too — floor nuts and chocolate and butter in an icing-like paste — or it is likely to be layered with marzipan. The spherical cookie is a extra conventional, it’s sometimes obtained an icing sugar glaze, although they do come coated in chocolate with coloured sprinkles on prime. They could or could not have raisins in them, however they’re all the time very candy.
Unhealthy Aussee is a reasonably riverside city, very conventional, surrounded by glacier capped mountains. On the primary freeway, there’s a barn of a spot with a large signal that claims “Ausseer Lebzelterei.” (Aussee is the area, and a lebzelterei is a gingerbread manufacturing unit.) This place makes gingerbread proper on web site. Some days, you possibly can look by he image window simply contained in the entrance door and see bakers onerous at work.
Gingerbread Apartment by Pam Mandel
This particular gingerbread factory was founded in 1892 by the Hungarian trained pastry chef Gustav Lewandovsky. Lewandovsky stocked the baked goods at the spa in town. Victorian and Edwardian era European spa culture must have been considerably more indulgent than the yoga and juice fast situations those seeking revitalization put themselves through today.
The salon that still bears Lewandowsky’s name is lovely but it’s more fun to see the old gingerbread molds and vintage packaging on display at the roadside stop. It’s also cool to see the machinery that was used as mass production methods came into place, the giant enamel mixers, the stacked baking ovens, and to have so many kinds of gingerbread to choose from.
It’s a roadside attraction kind of place, but the snacks are thousands of times better than anything you’d get at the World’s Largest Frying Pan or The Second Biggest Head of Abraham Lincoln. The only downside is that you may eat all of your souvenirs before you get them back home.
Top image: Bad Aussee Townscape 6/52 by Johannes Ornter by way of Flickr (Artistic Commons)
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