Snacks: Tasting two more German Christmas treats

After writing about thirteen traditional German Christmas treats and subjectively reviewing three of them in the past two years, the duck and I decided it was high time we tried a few more baked Christmas goods – this time, some we had never tried before. At first, we wanted to review apple-cinnamon heart cookies and a baked apple Stollen, both from the 2021 Bahlsen (a German cookies and cakes brand) Christmas lineup. We couldn’t find this particular Bahlsen Stollen anywhere (we were looking too early). But we did find Lidl store brand mini baked apple Stollen during one of our October grocery shops. Then we remembered the Bahlsen mini Spekulatius with milk chocolate we had seen during our apple Stollen search and decided that those sounded much more awesome anyway and grabbed a bag of those instead of the apple-cinnamon cookies. Now we had a new, even more exciting, theme for this year’s German Christmas treat taste test: Mini snacks! While we would not eat apple Stollen and chocolate Spekulatius in the same sitting (with us being decidedly peculiar when it comes to mixing fruit and chocolate flavors), those two treats promised to be a perfect representation of the fruity and the chocolaty side of German Christmas treats. Here’s what we thought:

Snacks: Getting ready for Christmas

It’s almost Christmas! You can tell by how many Christmas movies are currently added to some of your favorite streaming services, by the occasional fairy lights greeting you from foreign windows and by the fact that now Advent Calendars have joined the Christmas treats that have been hanging around the grocery stores since early September. Have I mentioned that the duck and I love Christmas? We do like Halloween, but having it not really be a thing in Germany means that we can start being excited about Christmas season even earlier than November 1st without feeling bad about it (not that we would).
Now that we’re way into November already, the duck and I finally decided to get our hands on some of those grocery store Christmas treats we only wrote about last year. Reviewing the whole baker’s dozen would have been too ambitious, at least for the 2020 duck and me, so we decided on Dominosteine, Stollen and Baumkuchenspitzen. Unlike most other super subjective taste tests that we’ve done in the past, neither of those treats are completely new to us. But since it’s been at least a year since we last had them and we are writing this in 2020, a year in which it wouldn’t be surprising if everything tasted slightly different, and since the duck and I are the ones making the rules on here anyway, we meekly present to you this year’s why-do-we-always-forget-that-we-are-super-particular-about-most-foods-and-on-top-of-that-terrible-at-describing-tastes – Christmas edition:

Day 2: It’s beginning to taste a lot like Weihnachten

Well, it did, about three months ago, when the first batch of Christmas snacks hit the German grocery store shelves. Since then their numbers have been steadily increasing, making it harder every day to resist the urge to buy all the Christmas foods! Because assembling yesterday’s list of our favorite Advent calendars we had to say ‘no’ to this year was so much fun, the duck and I decided to present you with yet another list. This one covers one of the duck’s absolute favorite (dream-)subjects: COOKIES, or, in a broader sense, Christmassy baked goods that you just have to try if you want to get a taste of Weihnachten!Of course there are a lot of seasonal baked goods that, in the duck and my opinion, you have to try at least once in your lifetime. However, to make it easier for you and even more so for us, we limited our selection to the sugary snacks we could find in the Christmas food section at local grocery stores. Also, because the duck and I are super picky, we want to stress that those snacks are by no means all our favorites. We actually do have rather strong feelings toward Lebkuchen and Marzipan, but we also want to give you the opportunity to form your own strong feelings and opinions. Anyway, enough blabbering, let’s get to it: