Rothenburg Schneebälle /Snowballs/

I have been deprived of my kitchen for the past almost four months due to various reasons – work related travels to Bucharest, moving out of my apartment in Sofia, relocating to Nuremberg, etc. And I have suffered significantly not being able to cook and for that matter, very often, eat properly.

I have spent the holidays at my parent’s house enjoying my mother’s delicious meals, yet I was not able to personally cook any of the holiday dishes. Oh, there was one attempt to make honey biscuits, which didn’t end well, as I was not familiar with my mom’s oven particulars, and that was it.

I am currently stuck in a hotel apartment with a kitchen as big as a chemical toilet. There is no oven, no proper knife, not even enough utensils to enable the preparation of a decent meal. (Yes, it is that bad! The other night I chopped up cabbage salad with a Swiss army knife, and that my friends, is what I call, a culinary challenge!)

Anyway, to cut the long story short, I am now in the outskirts of Nuremberg, in the Franconia region of Bavaria, Germany and today I will tell you about my visit to the town of Rothenburg ob der Tauber. It is a popular tourist destination for its well preserved medieval old town. Despite the fact, that it was gloomy and rainy, the narrow cobble-stone streets, took us on a fairytale-like journey around the town. Needless to say, I was fascinated by the candle-lit windows of the Gasthäusen, the pastry shops, the bakeries and the Käthe Wohlfahrt Christmas Village.

The must-try local specialty is the Rothenburg Schneebälle. Schneebälle (Snowballs) are the traditional desert of the area and you may see them in almost any Konditorei in Rothenburg ob der Tauber. These snowballs are wide stripes of a special, quite hard dough consisting of eggs, butter and plum-brandy, formed into a ball, and then deep fried. The traditional ball is then dusted with powder sugar, but nowadays, the shops offer huge variety of snowball toppings and fillings - Cinnamon sugar, Chocolate, Amarettomarzipan, Nougat, Eggnodliquor and Almonds, to name a few.

The snowballs are quite hard and it takes a while to master the art of eating them. It is actually better to break the ball into little bits, before eating it. It is crunchy and tastes like shortbread biscuits but heavier. I couldn’t eat a whole one by myself.