Cake Snob Reviews: Vienna
This is the first in a series of Cake Snob Reviews. When I travel, I’ll review the desserts I ate while there. But don’t expect these reviews to be of any practical value to you. I won’t write about the places people say you must try when traveling. BC and I try to avoid those tourist traps when we can. I’m not going to stand in line for hours to eat at Vienna’s most famous cafe because it can’t possibly be that good. Instead, I’ll review the place that was convenient because it was close to our hotel, or the bakery I walked by and thought, That tart in the window looks delicious, and stopped in to try it, or a place I went to because it was on a list of the best bakeries in Vienna—a list I found by having BC Google in German so we’d get local opinions. This isn’t my list of the best places to eat in Vienna, either; I was only here for a week! All I’m offering is my unvarnished opinion on the things I happened to order. Good; that’s out of the way. Now let’s get started.
My husband sold me on Vienna by telling me it’s the land of cake.
BC wasn’t wrong. Walk in any coffee shop or café there and you’ll find not just pastries, but cake, and not just one cake, but five different kinds, and not just plain cakes, but beautifully decorated ones sold by the slice. It’s a cake snob’s dream.
Or nightmare. With that much choice, you’re bound to have at least some bad cake in the bunch. And bakery cakes are usually butter cakes, often dry and too sweet. (Europeans haven’t caught on to the fact that salt makes every dessert better.)
I wasn’t worried, though; my cake radar is flawless. Send me any picture of a cake, and I’ll tell you if it’s going to be dry by looking at the photo. (Seriously, do it! Email me and I’ll help you vet some recipes.) The same goes for items in bakery cases. I tend to order winners just by looking at them. But that wasn’t the case in Vienna. My very first cake looked good but was abjectly horrible. It was so bad I couldn’t eat more than two bites of it, and I only ate the second because I couldn’t believe the cake radar had been so wrong.
A note on ratings: they range from one slice to a full cake. I highly recommend the desserts with full cakes and suggest you go out of your way to try them. Four slices means the dessert was pretty good—worth it if you’re already in the vicinity and craving something sweet. Anything less than four slices isn’t worth your money, your time, or the calories.
Sachertorte from Demel
Chocolate-scented sawdust.
You know how I said we avoid tourist traps? Well, this is one we fell prey to, and man do I regret it. Demel is one of the two “classic” places to get Sachertorte, the most famous cake in Austria. Sachertorte is a chocolate cake with a thin layer of apricot jam in the middle, coated with chocolate ganache. The cake looked good sitting in the case. My cake radar said so. But it was so dry it sucked the moisture from my tongue. It also didn’t taste like chocolate, which I do not understand. Chocolate is so overpowering it’s actually difficult to bake a flavorless chocolate cake, but Demel accomplished just that. The only thing that wasn’t awful: the layer of apricot jam. Don’t think that was enough to save this sorry excuse for a cake, though. It was too thin a layer to do much good.
Esterházy Torte from Anantara Palais Hansen Vienna Hotel
Dazzling flavors and textures, but no salt.
Esterházy Torte is a Hungarian cake that came to Austria via the Habsburg empire and which you can still find everywhere in Vienna. There are many variations, and this one was thin alternating layers of hazelnut cake and vanilla frosting that tasted custardy like crème patissiere. It looked beautiful. And moist, which it was. The flavors were wonderful, too. The cake really tasted like toasted hazelnut and the frosting was light and not too sweet. But my cake radar can’t tell if something is salted just by looking at it, and this cake didn’t have any salt in it. That was a huge mark against it, as was the overly sticky glaze on top. But despite those flaws, I still liked this cake.
Strawberry and Vanilla Cake from Kurkonditorei Oberlaa
Fine.
I looked over the case twice, and the cake radar wanted the apricot tart or the cream slice most. I couldn’t get those; I was in cake land, after all. The strawberry mousse looked nice enough. The texture of the cake was good—the mousse soft and fluffy and the cake light and moist. But the mousse didn’t have much flavor. And there was a strange, very thin, very dry layer of cake at the bottom that served as a cake board. If you got a bite of that bottom layer it was really unpleasant—I don’t think it was meant to be eaten. That aside, it was a boring cake, and this coming from a woman who adores plain vanilla. However, the atmosphere in the cafe was great. It was laid back and comfortable, and the red booths reminded me of the diners I love back home.
Apricot Cream Tart from Kurkonditorei Oberlaa
A pure celebration of apricots.
A bit disappointed after the strawberry cake, I really listened to the cake radar this time and ordered the tart that sang its siren song to me. It had tart a thin pastry crust and was filled with cream and apricots. This was a seasonal item, and you could tell. The apricots were juicy and sweet, and the creamy filling around them was light, a little tangy like cream cheese, with a smooth texture. The tart crust could have used some salt, but the overall experience was still a wonderful one. This was a dessert worth eating.
Strawberry Mousse and Poppyseed Cake from Ella’s Twins
Mousse: fantastic. Cake: not as much.
A poppyseed cake with some chocolate chips in it, topped with strawberry mousse and strawberry jelly. This was from the aforementioned list of best bakeries in Vienna, according to locals. My cake radar told me that mousse looked good, but it wasn’t sure about the cake itself. Trust the locals, I thought to myself. They have to know what they’re talking about when it comes to bakeries. I tried the cake first. It had a nice texture from the poppyseeds and chocolate, but it was undersalted and a tad dry. Maybe trusting the locals was a bad idea. I tried the mousse next, and it was the best one I’ve ever eaten. It was soft, extremely light, and tasted exactly like a strawberry in peak season, picked fresh from the garden. Absolute perfection. When eaten together, the cake was pretty good overall. But get dessert to go. If you sit and eat, you’ll get aromas wafting over from the seafood restaurant next door.
Next Week: More Reviews
I ate a lot of dessert in Vienna, and this is only half of it. Literally. So instead of waiting two weeks for a recipe to come out, you only have to wait one week, and then you’ll get the second half of my reviews, in which I finally find a perfect cake in Vienna.
Spread the Snob
If you want me to review a local bakery, let me know by commenting below or emailing me at confessionsofacakesnob@substack.com. Please recommend Confessions of a Cake Snob to a friend! And follow me on Pinterest or Instagram for more content.
It seems there's such a proliferation of cakes that it's not easy to find a good slice!