success in budapest
night bus from Budapest, Hungary to Brasov, Transylvania (Romania)
We found them! The Hungarian specialties a reader recommended. And we found a few more too 😉
We wandered over Chain Bridge to the funicular railway that takes unsuspecting tourists up to the palace and castle. We took one look at the price board and determined there MUST be a way to walk!!!! A very pleasant walk it turned out to be, too, winding up the hillside through the trees.
Our first find at the top was Hungarian Funnel Cake. The proprietor of the stall permitted only one photograph, so there you have him about to put the dough stick into the rotisserie-type oven. It will come out crunchy on the outside and supremely soft inside, and will be dipped in coconut or nuts or sugar or cocoa or cinnamon (which we tried) or just plain…apart it came in a long spiral….warm and delicious.
Along through the castle district, aware that this would probably not be the cheapest place to sample anything, but rejoicing that an upmarket Konditorei had the famed Drum Cake. Good thing that we are “the cup’s half full” people, coz we shared one piece between all of us! It was a delectable concoction – layers of a plain cake sandwiching layers of chocolate cream (and we decided that this much we will copy in our own kitchen). The real cake had a layer of crunchy toffee on top, which was all too sweet for us. Plain chocolate will top the one we make at home 😉
We strolled around the famous sites, took photos, enjoyed the shining sun, listened to the bells tolling at midday (on top of a hill is a great place to be for the noontime bell ringing – we’ve done it on Palatino Hill in Rome, Wawel Hill in Krakow, and now in Budapest too – each time purely coincidentally).
At the bottom of the hill I donned my extrovert hat and approached a bunch of people waiting at the traffic lights to see if any of them could help me find LANGOS (more or less pronounced lah-ng-osh). All of them were using their mobile phones! Not to be deterred, I enquired in a pharmacy (probably the most ironical place you could ask about an unhealthy treat!) As it so happened we were only a block away from the main market and were pointed in that direction with instructions to go to the top floor. We would never have even stopped at the stall if someone had not told us this was worth eating! It really did look more like a grog store to us, complete with resident alcoholic hunched over the table outside:
(that’s not the drunk in the pic!)
But stop, we did and with the finger waving and pointing that we have not needed for quite some time now, we ordered two different sorts. One was stuffed with meat and too similar to the Mongolian horseshoes that made Every Single One Of Us sick that we failed to properly appreciate it. The other was well worth scrambling round town to find. It was a dinnerplate-sized piece of simultaneously soft and chewy and crunchy fried dough covered with lashings of sour cream, garlic and grated cheese.
We have commented before that one of the good things about travelling in a big group is that you get to taste a larger range of foods than you could manage on your own. These were a case in point. Four of them filled ten of us. Completely.
Although we did manage to find room for a handful of fresh grapes….and then a mouthful of waffle a bit later on!
It really was a delectable day.
Oh, and the sightseeing was fun too!
Last, but not least. Guess what we had for dinner. Yes, should have been goulash with lots of paprika, shouldn’t it? Or perhaps goose something (lots of goose options on restaurant menu boards around town). But we had the right amount of money for a Burger King super special <blush> (a rare enough event to be blog-worthy)
Tags: 2008/09, food, postcard: Hungary, recreation
rayres
Oh, there you go again, taking MY photos 🙂
Why did I not try ANY of those amazing looking foods?!
We love the funnel cake too. We have a little boy at kindy whose dad is a hungarian baker. He bought some chimney stacks (funnel cake) into cake one day and I suggested they could sell them as a fundraiser. They did. Needless to say we had to support kindy in their fundraising effort. Yum!!!
We note you are now in Transilvania. Beware! Eat loads of garlic. Keep your windows shut tightly at night. DRACULA country!!
Langos looked really nice! And there’s nothing quite like a nice waffle. Drum cake looks like it might need to be attempted too – it doesn’t look that complicated.
HOORAY! Really now, I would have been embarrassed if you guys didn’t find the treats after all that. 😉
Two things to note before I stop talking about this stuff and step back to watch your adventures with jealousy- I’ve never heard of langos filled with meat before (so you guys now have more experience than me!) and I never liked the sweet top layer of drum cake either. I don’t know if you can get your hands on it in NZ but the Hungarian baker here in Cleveland hates the caramel layer too and instead makes a marzipan one. Absolute heaven.