The German obsession with cake & ice-cream

Imagine being hungry, like really hungry and instead of offering you a nice, filling, savoury meal, someone asks you if you want slice of cake. Noooo, I don’t want cake, I’m starving, I want real food!

I recently went to a cafe with a group of friends (German and non-German) and given that it was 12pm I assumed we’d be getting lunch. Lunch at 12pm is already something I’ve had to get used to, as in Germany lunch time can literally start from as early as 11:30am (!), so imagine my surprise when all this cafe sells is cake. Cake!? What about an actual lunch!? I was so hungry and didn’t wait to ruin my appetite so I decided I’d just order a tea and then go and get some real ‘lunch food’ afterwards.

However, whilst everyone was ordering, I realised that I wasn’t the only one not ordering cake. After politely asking why the other non- Germans were only ordering drinks, they also said that they don’t want cake for lunch and would rather have a proper meal. I knew it wasn’t just me, people from Germany do eat a lot of cake! They have such a sweet tooth!

Talking of which, the same goes for ice cream. I first realised this when I was doing my Erasmus semester in Flensburg (please note Flensburg is a very north and a very cold part of Germany). But the Flensburgers were eating ice-cream all year round, even in winter! And as soon as the weather is nice (windy but sunny and maybe 18 degrees), the ice cream parlours have the longest queues!

Germans have a reputation for eating Wurst and drinking Bier, but I don’t know how people managed to miss the amount of cake and ice-cream that is consumed here!

The UK certainly has a lack of ice cream parlours (I assume because of the weather?) and it is nice to be able to sit down for a cool snack in the sun but after two years of being here, I still can’t adjust to eating so much cake and ice-cream all the time!

It was nice to know that I’m not the only one who feels this way, and after my German friends had finished their cake, us non-Germans went to a burger bar round the corner to fill ourselves up with a good savoury meal!