Danish Pastries

During our trip to Copenhagen, we were lucky enough to experience the wide, wonderful world of Danish pastries. Just 500 m or so from our place sat the GuldBageren Danish bakery. The GB baked up some of the finest breads and pastries that have ever been tasted by man. These ranged from highly sugared delicious jam-filled pastries to highly sugared delicious custard-filled pastries to even more delicious sugar and apple and icing covered pastries. I loved Copenhagen for a lot of reasons but I would consider living there even if all they had going for them was the GuldBageren bakery.

On a recent warm summer evening in the Southern Europe of Germany, while most Bavarians had long since nodded off to sleep aided in no small part by the liquefied hops and yeast they had enjoyed earlier in the evening at their local garden of beer, Pemulis lay wide-awake in bed longing for an authentic GuldBageren jam-filled, sugar-coated, icing-laden Copenhagen breakfast treat. If anyone actually understood existentialism then they might describe the experience of eating one of these pastries as being essential to the Dasein of human existence. Then again, that hardly means anything at all and the meaning of a consumable of this quality has to rise above empty meaning.

Failing to fall back asleep, and knowing that the shops had been closed for hours (and, having experienced it recently, knowing that Copenhagen was about a ten hour drive away), Pemulis crept silently down to his teeny-tiny kitchen and began the process of trying to re-create the famous GuldBageren pastry. Being limited to DSL Internet speeds as a result of living just one block outside of the Mittlerer Ring and therefore being denied the Fiber Optic connections offered by M-Net to their other more privileged customers, Pemulis could not rely on the vast troves of information that would otherwise have been available to him in cyberspace. Instead, he performed a sort of transcendental meditation that projected his mind backwards in time to the last time he bit into a GB pastry. The trillions of synapse connections in his brain worked in overdrive to distill the underlying constituent parts that made up the incomparable taste of the dessert (or snack or breakfast or lunch or...). He settled on probably: flour, yeast, salt, eggs, milk, sugar, butter, and home-made jam.

He started mixing the flour with the salt and the sugar and the yeast and mixing the eggs with the milk and the butter. He then mixed everything together into one big bowl. By this time it was nearly morning, however, and he realized that he had used the exact same ingredients that he would have for making pancakes, and so, instead of potentially wasting all those useful ingredients, he whipped up some pancakes with blueberries and the whole family enjoyed a gourmet Canadian breakfast.

THE END