Chocolate Cakes, Coffee and Vienna – How Irresistible?

As I walk across Donaukanal (Danube Canal) and towards the beautiful St. Stephen’s Cathedral, I start wondering if there are any ugly buildings in this city. I am unable to find any, and giving a miss to a Starbucks doing brisk business, I reach Hotel Sacher.  I am lucky to get a table by the window with a view of the imposing Staatsoper, Vienna’s Opera House.

Their goodies for the day are on display, but I straightaway ask for Sacher Torte to tick mark having eaten Sacher Torte at its home (well, it has been a matter of long legal tussle and while I go with what the courts decided, more discerning patrons seem to put their weight behind Cafe’ Demel). Well, is it any different from a very good chocolate cake with an apricot jam layer?  I wish my wife was there as she would have managed a far more poetic description of the cake than my more workmanlike one.

I immediately ask for a Wiener Melange (Viennese coffee with whipped cream) along with Apfelstrudel (apple strudel), and read through the elegantly placed booklet on the history of the Sacher Torte as I wait for my coffee to be served. The apfelstrudel has large chunks of apple and in a crumbly pastry layer rather than almost minced ones with the pastry layer gone chewy you find at many places. The portion is almost of American proportions, and along with whipped cream laden coffee I exhaust my weekly calorie quota.

But then I had a more important task of reporting from even more famous Cafe Demel, all for the sake of this blog! So I decide to walk around town for another hour to somehow get myself to eat another cake. My ugly building search had been unsuccessful till now, but I suddenly find a beautiful building’s facade made ugly by a Nespresso billboard (well George Clooney’s presence on it means not many women are going to agree with me). As I reach the end of my hour long walk, I reach Cafe Demel which has a much wider variety of cakes and pastries on display as compared to Sacher Torte.

Since I would have been a very incompetent judge to compare Demel’s Sacher Torte with Sacher’s, I order Anna Cake instead. It’s similar to Sacher Torte with two differences – a much thicker chocolate icing, and a hint of alcohol (orange liqueur I am told).

I walk out of Cafe Demel, mind refusing to even think of anything sweet,realsing how much more my wife would have loved this Cafe hopping, while Doner Kebab at a roadside shop catches my attention. I wrote the title of this blog merely as a rhetorical question, but now sounds like a genuine question to me…maybe we are really from Mars!