I Ate That

That is an unbaked apple strudel.  Or, as they say in Austria, "apfelstrudel."

It's a traditional Viennese dessert, though we were in Innsbruck at the time, stopped at a pastry school that sat on top of a hill.  (Years later, I'd find out that Friend Ashley had gone to school to become a pastry chef.  I didn't ask if the two were related, but I like to think that they were.)

Our big group of forty American teenagers split down into ten groups of four, one for each of the ten baking stations in the big, sterile kitchen, each station with the ingredients carefully measured out for us.  The instructor, a small man with grey hair and a kind smile, barked out instructions from the front of the room in heavily accented english, making big, comical gestures with his arms when he couldn't find the right words.  We'd take turns rolling the dough and chopping the apples, trying to find the best way for four people to make one apfelstrudel.  And once the apple filling had been carefully folded into its dough pocket, and the glazed pastry baked gently in the oven, we'd titter headily at the rum the recipe called for, and how much extra we'd pretended to put in the filling, making sly references to smuggling the bottles, still capped at our baking stations, out of the school under our jackets.   

The finished pastries would come out of the oven with varying degrees of success, but we didn't care.  We made them!  And though ours was a little lumpy, and had too much cinnamon for my taste, we ate every last crumb. 

Make your own!