6/17/14 Vienna Cafe Demel

After watching the Morning Exercises at the Spanish Riding School, I hobbled over to Cafe Demel, which pretty much right next to Michaelerplatz.  The tables outside were full, so I went inside and discovered more seating in back.  The most awesome part is that they have their pastry kitchen set up as a display kitchen separated from the rest of the cafe by glass walls.  Technically I was sitting in the smoking section, but Cafe Demel attracts a lot of tourists and thankfully no one was smoking.

I ordered hot chocolate and cake and sat back to watch the pastry chefs at work.

A lot of cakes involve thin layers of actual cake between thicker layers of cream or fruit.  Each cake is sliced into three layers then trimmed.  Making a beautiful cake results in a lot of waste as the edges are repeatedly trimmed off and thrown away.

Here a fellow is working on making a tree sculpture.  It seemed a bit out of season, but who knows what it was really for.

Hot chocolate and truffle cake.  This was very delicious.  Hot chocolate here is generally less sweet than American hot chocolate, but you don't get any of that fake dairy filler bullshit.

Here, a pastry chef is making decorative tops for cakes.  Instead of writing directly on the cake, she took circles made of...  fondant, marzipan, not sure, airbrushed them with different colors, then used gold icing to write the message on top (,,Liebe Oma" etc.) 

Here are some of the cakes that have come out of the ovens waiting to be trimmed.  Note that the cake forms are just circles of metal without bottoms.  

This fellow was taking the baked cakes, cutting the tops and bottoms off, then putting the trimmed whole cake onto a tray to be worked on further by someone else.

The machine in the foreground with the conveyor belt is a marzipan flattening machine.  A big ball of marzipan is run through the machine, which sounds like it squashes it, then the squashed sheet is run through the press again and again until the desired thickness is reached.

The cake top decoration continues.

Here's where I was sitting.

Here are some decorated cake toppers.

This is what the front room of Cafe Demel looks like.

At this point, I had been in contact with Rex, et al, and discovered that they were sitting down to lunch in Cafe Central.  As I was pretty much finished, I headed over there to get back in contact with them, and to sit down some more, before going my own way for the afternoon.

On the way I passed a candy shop where people were making candy by hand.

This is the cake display at Cafe Central.

This is what Cafe Central looks like as you walk in the door.  It also has excellent food and cake.