Berlin Food Guide: Eat Like A Hobbit And You Shall Be Rewardedby Randi / September 16, 2014
Berlin is the home of Europe’s first all-vegan grocery store, Veganz, and it is definitely a must on any vegan’s to-do list. While it is chock full of really fun, and some hard-to-find, products, the stock is not necessarily rare or unique. But, the fact that you don’t have to check labels on anything makes this the fun stop it is. Also, all your favorite junk foods are in the same place!
Look at all of these plane snacks!!
Berliners are fortunate enough to have this vegan mecca, but guess what – there are two of them! There’s one store in Friedrichshain, of course, because that is Germany’s East Village for veganism, and one in Prenzlauer Berg. The stores are roughly the same. We actually went back and forth between the two a few times, especially when one didn’t have the soft-serve delivered yet. (I mean what???) But yes, you read right! Both Veganz stores house a cafe called Goodies, which sells cafe food, including bagel sandwiches, pastries, cookies, and vegan soft-serve ice cream! The soft-serve comes from a powder mix, like all addictive drugs, and sometimes it takes all day for that powder to be delivered, apparently, but it’s definitely worth trying because VEGAN SOFT-SERVE! It wasn’t very delicious by any stretch of the imagination, but come on, you can’t pass up trying vegan soft-serve.
Veganz has the most fantastic array of fun convenience foods, from vegan gummies of all sorts (including coke bottles!) to giant pink bags of Manner (which of course I bought and ate real fast). The store also has the greatest round up of daily essentials in the fridge and freezer, which definitely were hard to pass by as a visitor. If you are considering moving to Berlin, I would say that the opportunity to actually purchase these perishable items should put another check in the pro column. They have the European cheeses! Those are the good kinds, so they say! Look at all of that cruelty-free goodness!
Okay, so here is what I bought. Well, here is what made it home. Not everything I bought made it home. It’s like the perfect stop for all of your plane snacks.
As aforementioned, the giant pink bag of Manner is a must-buy. Manner is the greatest wafer cookie treat in the entire world if you don’t know. They sell it all over America in shitty little convenience stores, but it all contains milk in the USA. Ughhh! It makes no sense when the same product changes formula in different countries. Anyway, this one is obviously vegan, so stock up. Oh my lord Manner is the best.
Continuing from the left: That red/coconut Bonbarr was okay, but those purple/nougat Bonbarrs are REVOLTING. Oh my god, do not buy them. They taste like unsweetened baking chocolate that you left unwrapped in a dusty old pantry for so many years that all the current inhabitants of the house with said pantry don’t remember who you are. Don’t buy it.
That Oskri cashew-coconut-cereal bar was really yummy! I’ve loved all Oskri products that I’ve tried, but watch out when you find them in the wild because I think some have honey.
The Vivani black cherry bar is banging, though nothing can beat those cheap Cella chocolate covered cherries for me. But this was great.
Those biona cool cola bottles are just alright. The flavor is spot-on but the gumminess is lacking. It’s more like a soft candy that you’ll just bite through and be like whaat, where’s the gumminess? They sell them at As Nature Intended in London, FYI.
If you’ve never had Primal Strips, you need to go find them right now because they are a godsend for traveling vegans! My friend beanerschnitzel introduced me to them, and I am so grateful because they are amazing! They are soy, seitan, or mushroom-based (depending on the flavor) protein strips that are softer than traditional jerky and much more delicious (and much less disgusting in theory than dried meat). The Thai Peanut is my absolute favorite flavor; it is one of the seitan ones and has the perfect amount of spice and peanuttiness.
That White Chocolate Dairy-Free bar, whose brand name I can no longer make out, is great for baking and was pretty okay for regular eating, but who eats plain white chocolate anyway?
The Moo-free Caramelized Hazelnut Nibs bar is my favorite thing out of the whole gosh darn stash. This chocolate bar was one of the best I’ve ever had! It was just the perfect chocolate depth and the perfect nibby stuff on top. You can’t beat caramelized hazelnuts, so yeah, get a lot of these.
That Chocolate Donut Pastry near the top? That’s from the selection of refrigerated yummies that Veganz sells and it was REMARKABLE. It was like a hard donut that had a creamy filling and a crunchy cookie-like base inside all of that chocolate coating. I want another one very soon.
Baby food pouches are always welcome buys for me, and this apple banana one was yummy. I do prefer my travel baby food with a mix of veggies and fruit, but Veganz only had fruit.
Okay, the Stroopwaffels. These carmelly syruppy waffle cookies are ridiculously good! Oh my goodness I don’t know how to describe them. They are soft but not crumbly, more like softly glued together or something fantastic. And the sweetness isn’t just sugary, it’s like deep and caramelly and beautiful. These are amazing. Except the picture on the wrapper is misleading, because it looks like there are 10 or so cookies inside but there are only 6, so you are going along eating all these amazing cookies and thinking you have so many more before you will have eaten half the package, but then the whole thing is gone.
Amore Mio’s Chocolate Hazelnut treat thing was okay, a little unsubstantial and airy but good.
Fruit leather – no surprises there.
The Giant Gallon Bag of German Fruit Gummies was another of my favorites! Again, the lack of gelatin makes for a very interesting chewiness, in that your bite goes right through a little too easily. But, these tasted great and they are still vegan gummies so yay buy a gallon, why not!
The Nirwana Noir chocolate bar was very interesting. It’s a semisweet chocolate with a nut truffle filling, and as amazing as that sounds, I was surprised that I wanted it to be a little sweeter. Still, definitely worth trying.
That Naturata Stracciatella Kirsch white chocolate bar has the greatest concept and name, definitely, but like all white chocolate bases it was a little lacking in depth. The chocolate cherry bits were really yummy!
So that is Veganz! I hope this helps you decide what to buy. When it doubt, buy it all.
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Getting Swole: SIMPLE Protein-Packed Chocolate Peanut Butter Cups
Since I’m a human who lives on this planet, I am in love with the magic combination of chocolate and peanut butter. It is objectively better than any other duo and I will fight any suggestions you may make in the comments. A lot of British people don’t understand peanut butter and I think that might be the real reason behind the American Revolution. As an American import, I myself might eat more peanut butter than anyone else in this marmite-eating land. (Marmite and peanut butter are not similar or interchangeable in the least, and the fact that some people still believe this lie causes a good deal of British nose-turning at my fren PB and as a result much of my consternation.) I ran a little bakery market stall on the weekends for a short while and always had peanut butter cookies on offer and people would be like ‘ew definitely don’t want those’ and I would leap from behind the stall and shove the peanut butter cookies down their throats and scream HOW DO YOU LIKE IT NOW MORON? I don’t do the stall anymore.
So yeah you could say I am a huge fan of the stuff. (Notice how I use real, inoffensive words like “am in love with” and “am a huge fan of” instead of taking tragic stories of mentally ill people and turning their names into cutesy trendy vocab because I am not a FUCKING MONSTER, PEOPLE. STOP DOING IT.) Given my medical need to eat chocolate every day, putting the two together makes perfect culinary sense and is an efficient method for ensuring I eat both in a day. What’s more, I need to fit in a lot of protein during the day too, so it helps my #goals to use my desserts or snacks as a vehicle for protein too. So it makes delicious wise sense for me to combine all these needs into one amazing dessert. I know what you are thinking: “Wait, didn’t I already read this post and didn’t you already give me this recipe?” No but I can see why you went there. The last recipe I gave was for protein-packed cashew butter cups and these are chocolate peanut butter cups. Yes I have a one-track mind. But really, the previous recipe is amaaaazing and produces a cookie dough-like filling, but it is complicated. There’s cashew butter and protein powders and flax and coconut oil and OATS? and F-ING CHICKPEAS. If you feel like getting all that shit out of your cupboard and having your husband ask like mine did ‘good lord why did you put oats and beans in a chocolate thing?’, then go nuts. They’re worth it. But, if you’re like I was this past week and you just want a simple PB cup that requires FOUR INGREDIENTS only (plus the chocolate), thereby saving you a lot of time but still being insanely delicious, then this post is for you.
SIMPLE PROTEIN PEANUT BUTTER CUPS
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Ingredients
For the chocolate:
For the filling:
Directions (or just follow the pictures!)
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GET YOURSELF SOME NEW ORCHESTRATIONS 
(how much do you love my gigantic food processor it’s GIGANTIC) 
NEW ROUTINES AND RED VELVET CURTAINS 
GET A FEATHERED HAT FOR THE BABY |
husbo p got me flowers 🙂
Enjoy! Here’s my requisite tupperware shot.
These Double Caramel Waffle Cookies Taste Like Your Childhood!Â
Not that I know what your childhood was like, let alone what the defining tastes of it were, but I’m assuming these will give you such nostalgia you’ll be compelled to call your best friend from day camp.
This evening, I felt compelled to make caramel cookies with these fancy new accidentally vegan products (caramel extract and caramel chips!! score!) I found. I winged a recipe, expecting (hoping?) to test a few batches to get it right, but I loved the first ones! As I bit into my first of many, I realized oh my god I know this taste! But what was it? It was CHILDHOOD .
This evening, I felt compelled to make caramel cookies with these fancy new accidentally vegan products (caramel extract and caramel chips!! score!) I found. I winged a recipe, expecting (hoping?) to test a few batches to get it right, but I loved the first ones! As I bit into my first of many, I realized oh my god I know this taste! But what was it? It was CHILDHOOD .
But telling myself “it’s just childhood!” wasn’t going to cut it. I needed to figure out what it was! I had vague flashes of memories of eating really fast breakfasts before going to, well, day camp. But that wasn’t a lot to go on, except to recall that I was around age 8 because I went to overnight camp at age 10 like a badass mofo. So hmm what did I used to eat for breakfast when I was 8? Oh yes! Microwave pancakes and Eggo waffles!! These taste like microwave breakfast doughs? That isn’t a huge selling point, I guess. Also it isn’t exactly right. We are getting closer though!
Luckily, husband came home and tried one and said, in the nicest way, that it tasted like cheap maple syrup, or really cheap pancake syrup that has no real maple in it. Yes! That’s it! These cookies, these magical flashback cookies, taste like the melted butter-cheap pancake syrup mixture my mom would make my brother and me for our microwave pancakes and waffles! THE BEST THING EVER! IN COOKIE FORM! Hence why I’m calling them waffle cookies. They taste like the waffles of childhood. Cue the music.
Luckily, husband came home and tried one and said, in the nicest way, that it tasted like cheap maple syrup, or really cheap pancake syrup that has no real maple in it. Yes! That’s it! These cookies, these magical flashback cookies, taste like the melted butter-cheap pancake syrup mixture my mom would make my brother and me for our microwave pancakes and waffles! THE BEST THING EVER! IN COOKIE FORM! Hence why I’m calling them waffle cookies. They taste like the waffles of childhood. Cue the music.
CARAMEL WAFFLE COOKIES
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Makes about 9 cookies
Ingredients:
Directions:
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 I continue to post pictures of the steps just because I know you love it  This is what stuff looks like while baking in an oven aren’t you pleased I’m sharing?  ME WANT COOKIE |
For those in the London area, the products I used are Dr Oetker’s caramel flavor (I’m sorry, flavour) and random caramel chips from Kosher Kingdom in Golders Green (that shop is a veritable gold mine of accidentally vegan baking chip flavours). For those in America, if you can’t find your own versions, I’d be happy to bring you some in January if you want to meet me in NYC. It’ll cost you either the price of a Broadway show ticket OR enough food to satisfy me at Cinnamon Snail. Hahahah you think you know which one’s cheaper! That’s adorable!
