Celebrating 12 Austria style

Anna McBrayer
Nov 18, 2016
2 min read

Patrick turned 12 this week! Seriously. When did this happen?!? He has been crazy over getting a penny board which is a little “pocket-sized” skateboard. So his awesome parents got him one for his birthday and he was stoked. He said he couldn’t help but smile opening it up. He rode it to school and managed no accidents along the way thank the good Lord. He says all of the kids sang to him throughout the day and he thought that was really cool.

Justin broke him out of school early to take him to his traditional brithday lunch and then came home for me to take him to the bakery to pick out his cakes for our chorus of Happy Birthday later that night. On our way home we managed to pass by the piano store when it was open for him to have a much needed jam session. We made friends with the owner. He and Patrick shared compositions and was invited back to play more sometime. Finally access to a piano! Woohoo!

To celebrate properly, we decided to wander through the Christmas markets for dinner. The boys got hotdogs that were every bit 15″ long and about 1/3 longer than the really delicious bun they came on. I treated myself to a Gluhwein, which is sort of like a mulled wine. It comes in red and white. They also serve a type of apple cider and orange cider that they call punch which is spiked with rum. It’s pretty much delicious and if you are over 4′ tall, you have a mug of something hot an yummy in your hand.

Justin has become a connoisseur of a local dish called Kaiserschmarrn, which is basically a pancake, cooked then cut up and cooked again and served with fried apples or applesauce. In other words, dessert for dinner. Perfect. Here’s the scoop on this dish from Wikipedia.

Kaiserschmarrn or Kaiserschmarren[1] (Emperor’s Mess[2]) is a shredded pancake, which has its name from the Austrian emperor (Kaiser) Franz Joseph I, who was very fond of this kind of fluffy shredded pancake. It is a popular meal or dessert in Austria, South Germany, Hungary, Slovenia, and northern Croatia. The name Kaiserschmarren is a compound of the words Schmarren (shredded pancake) and Kaiser (emperor). Schmarren is a colloquialism used in Austrian and Bavarian to mean “trifle, mishmash, mess, nonsense and folly“. Kaiser Franz Joseph’s love for this dish was referred to humorously as his “folly”. The word “Schmarren” is related to scharren (to scrape) and schmieren (to smear).