Chimney Cakes

When we were at the Bryant Park holiday market before the holidays one night, we saw a really long line for a stand selling chimney cakes. We had never had one before, but they sounded interesting. We made a mental note to remember these if we came back another day and there were less than fifty people in line.

Chimney cakes originated in Hungarian cuisine where Wikipedia tells us they are known as kürtőskalács. This style of cake has been around since medieval times, and is pretty simple in concept. They bake the dough in the oven in the same style as rotisserie chicken with a rotating spit. The chimney cakes vendor at the Bryant Park market offered them plain ($7 each) or with an assortment of toppings like Nutella or dulce de leche for $2 extra each.

We got ours filled with Nutella which was a good combination for a snack. We first tried biting into the cake directly to eat it, but found that it unraveled into spirals which would have actually made it easier to eat if not for all the Nutella getting all over our fingers. We would imagine that a chimney cake without fillings would be really easy to eat by just peeling apart the spirals, but we didn't find a great solution with the fillings.

The cake itself was sweet as it was rolled in sugar, and the Nutella added even more sweetness and a bit of nuttiness to the cake. The texture of the cake was a bit on the crisper side since it was so thin, but tasted really good. A thought it was a touch too sweet, but overall was still good. M was curious what it would taste like without the Nutella, since that made it extra sweet.

While we're glad that we were able to try out something new and from a new country for WorldEats, we don't know that we would need to get this again, especially since the line was always so long.