This part of the Ennstal is a river valley lined by a bunch of tiny villages. People have lived here for a good long time; the church just up the hill was established in the 1100s, but there’s still not much by way of urban — or even suburban — development. The bakery closed, and the post office and the shoe store moved into town. There’s a new cafe where the old cafe once was and there are a handful of traditional guest houses, some are pub style restaurants, a few are also small inns where you can get a room.
Gasthof Wöhrer is one of those little inns now. Before it got new and shiny, it was a traditional local joint filled with farmers playing cards and high school kids who decided to spoil their dinners by feasting on schnitzel after spending the afternoon swimming in the lake. There were not so many cake eating Americans in the past, though I have no data on how many cake eating Americans visit now that the place has been remodeled. There was a group of about eight teenagers when we were there, probably getting schnitzel.
There were three kinds of cake on the menu, all of them complicated layer cake constructions involving a basic sponge, an obscene amount of whipped cream, and several kinds of custard or mousse. The layering cake is typically a genoise that’s fluffier, lighter, than your standard yellow cake. I’ll bet if you study pastry in Austria, you’re required to master the genoise before you move on to layering your cake into one of three on the menu for the day.
I opted for the eierlikörtorte, or egg nog torte, so named for the butter colored egg nog gelatin that graces the top of the cake. There was a layer of coffee mousse in there, and a thin slice of chocolate sponge, and because there wasn’t enough cream separating the layers of cake, there was also a huge dollop of whipped cream on top.
I had two cups of coffee to stave off a sugar coma. It didn’t work.
