Viennese Pastries

Recipes that tell stories
Viennese Pastries

Viennese Pastries

Recipes that tell stories

Viennese pastries are not desserts. Desserts come after a meal. A Mehlspeise – Vienna’s untranslatable word for its beloved flour-based sweets – is the meal. At least that’s what our grandmas will tell you. Behind each one lies a story: of imperial courts and suburban kitchens, of happy accidents, legal feuds, and hands that have known for decades exactly when a dough has been kneaded enough.

 

Here are five of those stories. And as with all good stories, they’re best enjoyed with a fork in hand.

Freshly baked Buchteln from the oven – baking course at Vollpension Vienna

Buchteln: A Bohemian Import with Heart

Like so many good things in Viennese cooking, Buchteln came from Bohemia. When Bohemian cooks took jobs in Vienna's bourgeois households in the 19th century, their recipes came with them: fluffy yeast-dough buns, packed tightly into the baking dish so they grow together in the oven and can be torn apart at the table. The classic filling is Powidl – a dark plum jam.

Our grandmas say the secret isn't in the recipe but in the patience. Yeast dough can tell when you're in a hurry. It wants warmth, it wants time, and it wants to be left alone – a bit like the Viennese themselves.
Apple Strudel recipe from Vollpension Vienna

Apple Strudel: The Well-Travelled One

Apple strudel is considered the Viennese pastry .The technique of stretching dough paper-thin arrived in Vienna via the Ottoman Empire and Hungary. Vienna's oldest surviving strudel recipe comes from a handwritten cookbook dated 1696, kept today in the Vienna City Library at City Hall.

The rule every strudel baker is measured against: the dough must be stretched so thin you can read a newspaper through it.
Sachertorte recipe from Vollpension Vienna

Sachertorte: Austrias most famous cake

The legal battle between Hotel Sacher and the Demel pastry shop over the "original" Sachertorte dragged on for decades, hinging in part on the earth-shattering question of whether the jam belongs only under the glaze or also in the middle.

Our grandmas stay out of the feud. They bake their chocolate cake the way they always have – and serve it with whipped cream, because a Sachertorte without Schlag is only half the story.
Punschkrapferl recipe from Vollpension Vienna

Punschkrapferl: Pink Outside, Potent Inside

The Punschkrapferl is the most charming leftover-recycling scheme in pastry history: cake trimmings and crumbs soaked in rum and punch syrup, wrapped in sponge and coated in that unmistakable pink glaze.

Our grandmas know a proper Punschkrapferl needs a generous hand with the rum – if you're going to skimp on the punch, you might as well bake a plain marble cake.

Kardinalschnitten Recipe from Vollpension Vienna

Kardinalschnitte: Sweet Diplomacy in White and Gold

Created in the 1930s and dressed in the colours of the Catholic Church: white meringue and golden sponge, artfully baked into one another, filled with coffee cream or whipped cream and redcurrant jam. A cake as a gesture of reverence – diplomacy in pastry form.

The meringue makes it tricky: too long in the oven and it hardens, too short and it collapses. Our grandmas bake it by feel – and their feel has a few decades' head start on any thermometer.

Where the Stories Continue

All of these pastries can be read about — or you can eat them where they are still baked by hands that have known for decades when a dough is ready. At Vollpension, Viennese grandmothers and grandfathers bake from their own family recipes every day: at Schleifmühlgasse in the 4th district and in the 1st district.

 

And for those who don’t just want to taste, but learn how to handle a yeast dough or glaze a torte themselves: in our baking courses, the grandmothers show you how it’s done, with the little tricks that aren’t written in any cookbook.

 

More about the culture around Viennese pastries in our Coffee House Guide.