Eierkuchenfest

Once we were back from Egypt and I'd finally recovered from the bronchitis, we were ready to start doing things again. The year before I'd read an article in one of the free local newspapers talking about the big Eierkuchenfest (egg cake festival) in the nearby village of Kunitz, and the article really stressed the secrecy of the local recipe which was handed down from generation to generation, and how people ordered their cakes in advance. I didn't remember all the details, but when I saw a poster downtown advertising the 2008 Eierkuchenfest, we knew we had to check it out. (I mentioned to a few people at work that we were planning on going, and they warned me that Eierkuchen were likely just what in Canada we'd call pancakes, and it wasn't going to be all that exciting, but we decided to give it a try anyhow.)
The weather was lovely when we set out, so we decided to walk there rather than biking, as it's only about 5 km away. We took a nice route along a path by the Erlkönig statue (the alder king, immortalized in a scary poem by Goethe, which took statue form here), and got there in the early afternoon.

After waiting in line at the cake booth for a while while Jeremi bought us beers, I overheard a conversation in front of me, where the women were saying that it was worth the two hour wait, and I noticed they were all holding slips of paper with numbers on them.
I looked around some more, and found the place were we could buy the slips of paper. (We ended up not needing to buy them though, as someone in line gave us two free cake vouchers that she didn't need.) These slips of paper were given a number, and I was told to only reenter the cake line once my number had come up on the sign.

This made me look around some more, until I found the LED sign with the pizza graphic, that told us that Eierkuchen number 648 was ready. Since there were about 200 more to go before ours came up, we decided to have a bratwurst, and go for a walk. On top of a nearby hills are the ruins of Kunitzburg, a castle that can be seen from parts of Jena. And so we set off to find it:
It didn't take too long to get there, and it was a nice way to kill time.
Here's Jeremi hanging out in one of the remaining windows, which provide a nice view over the city of Jena.
There's the city, in the valley below.
While we were up there it started to get really windy, and some dark clouds blew in, so we figured it was a good time to head back and check on the status of our cakes.
On the way we came across a goat farm, with this little one peeking out the window. She was so still and looking at us for so long that I wasn't convinced it was actually a real goat, but Jeremi went closer to confirm, and it most certainly was.
And so we found ourselves back at the festival, and only had to wait a short time now for our number to come up. It gave us time to check out some of the live entertainment, buy some olives from the vendor in the middle, and check out the fundraising efforts of the community group which is trying to rebuild a historical covered wooden bridge that used to be in Kunitz until the Nazis destroyed it during their retreat at the end of the war.
Finally, after all that waiting, we sat down to enjoy our cakes. They weren't pancakes at all, but rather something like funnel cakes (if that's familiar to you), a sort of batter poured directly into hot oil in a stream, so the cake is composed of a long string of donut-like cake piled up on itself, and topped with powdered sugar. All in all, it was quite tasty.


We were lucky we got cakes when we did, as they were shutting down the food part of the event as we were finishing, and setting up for the music and beer part of the evening. And so we began heading home, stopping on the way at a nice restaurant in Kunitz where they smoke locally grown trout. We liked it so much that we brought mom and dad back there when they visited in December. By the time we were done supper we were walking back in pitch darkness, but we were able to follow the line of candle lanterns that were being released from somewhere in downtown Jena. It was really a lovely day.