the sweet scrapbook

They are a German confectionery company that has turned 35 years old this year. It was founded by Aloys Coppenrath and Josef Wiese. They started out with 35 employees in a small town called Westerkappeln (located in Northern Germany). Their first product was the Viennese Selection - an assortment of six cream cakes. I haven't been able to find it in their current range. The only cake assortment I've seen is the Patisserie Selection (link, image), which offers ten items: three slices of cake (Black Forest Kirsch Torte, Almond Cream Cake and... I cannot figure out what the third slice is), two slices of roll (Strawberry Cream Sponge Roll and... again, I have no idea what the last one is), one eclair with chocolate and whipped cream in the middle and no frosting and four small fruity cakes with a lot of whipped cream. This is weird. Adding up, there are 9 items in the presentation image. Did they leave one out when they took the picture or is the number in the presentation of the product wrong?

Anyway, going back to their history and back in time... In 1976, they expanded their range, one of the new products included being the Black Forest Gateau (link, image), which today is their most popular product. Their range continued to expand in the following years and, in 1981, they launched the Apple Tart (link, image) and their first oven-ready product, the Apple Strudel (link, image). In the mid-1980s, they went international - they started selling strudels in the UK. That was just the first step outside of Germany. Netherlands, Luxembourg, Austria, France, Portugal, Poland, Ireland and then most other European countried followed. And then they expanded to the US and Australia. The continued growth of the company meant that in 1991 they opened a new facility in Mettingen (another small town in Northern Germany). In 1994, the Coppenrath-Wiese Sacher Torte (link, image) was launched in Austria. In 2003, the entire production was transferred to Mettingen as that facility had been extended. Mettingen would remain their sole production site from that point on. 2009 was the year Sweet Dreams (a collection of hand-decorated premium tortes with sophisticated ingredients and a distinctive dome shape) was launched.

Today, Coppenrath-Wiese are a medium-sized family business (2000 employees) and Europe's largest peoducer of frozen desserts. Their product range comprises 50 different items (yes, I actually counted the ones on the website and they are right, there have exactly 50). They say that they take their social and environmental responsibilities extremely seriously and they present in detail just what exactly they do. They also have a detailed presentation of the production process. They list the sources of the ingredients they use, they explain how they bake their products, how they freeze them and how they package them. They state that they do not use preservatives (and they explain just how it is possible for their products to last without preservatives), artificial colours, flavourings or hydrogenated fats. They also state that they make sure that their products do not stay in their warehouse for more than 14 days after being produced.

Going through their history as they present it on the website, I then felt the need to mentally go through my personal history. I discovered their products in January 2005. Back then, it was the Chocolate Cream Torte (link, image) and the Black Forest Kirsch Torte. Later, I discovered their strudels, the Mixed Fruit Strudel (link, image) and the Apple Strudel. About two years ago I was going to discover new products. The 6 Apple & Nut Slices (link, image), the 6 Pear & Chocolate Desserts (link, image), the Apple Tart and the Apple and Walnut Cake (link, image). Eight products. Just eight. Yet I know their logo so well. I guess that says something about how much I've enjoyed them. And now I was going to try the ninth one, the...

... Sweet Dreams Chocolate Truffle (link, image)! Doesn't that image on the packaging look beautiful? And when I got home and I took it out... it didn't look like that. I thought it looked better. Aesthetically, I thought it was perfect. And I was dying to try it, I was so curious, but it was just too beautiful. Three days passed before I took a big, big knife, the biggest one that I have (I just measured the blade, it's 35 centimetres long)... and I stabbed this beauty! It was still frozen when I did that so it was a bit difficult, but I finally managed to split it into two. It looked nice inside as well. Only one thing looked a bit wrong. The chocolate chips in the upper layer of cream were not distributed evenly. Instead, most of them were to be found towards the bottom of that layer. I sent one half back to frozen lands and left the other half in the kitchen. Yes, half! 325g of cake. And I'm the one who can rarely eat a whole muffin all at once (that makes me remember the look on daddy's face when I was little and he would see I had tried a square or half a square out of every chocolate bar we had bought just hours before - he just couldn't understand why I felt the need to "experiment", just try a little of each instead of finishing a bar before moving on to another). But this was a dessert with chocolate ice-cream. And ice-cream and watermelon happen to be the two things I can eat in huge quantities. I had already stabbed it, so I obviously could not wait four hours - that's for how long they recommand it should be kept at room temperature before consumption. Ice-cream melts from the outside, so that's how I started eating it. Little by little, as long as it was creamy, then I would leave it for a while, then I would come back to the kitchen again for some more... and so on. Still, I couldn't finish that half all alone that day. But it had nothing to do with the quality of the product itself. The taste was amazing. The sponge was moist, just as I like it. I could have done without the chocolate chips, though - they didn't seem to do the texture any favours.

Ingredients: cream 25%, sugar, chocolate 11% (),; made in a production area that uses nuts.

Storage: -18° for 18 months; -12° for 3 weeks; -6° for 4 days; 5° (refrigerator) for 1 day; room temperature for 3-4 hours; do not re-freeze once thawed.

Nutritional info per 100g of product: energy 346 kcal, protein 4.9g, carbohydrate 31.2g (of which sugars 21.1g), fat 21.8g (of which saturates 13.4g; monounsaturated fatty acids 6.6g; polyunsaturated fatty acids 0.8g), cholesterol 0.05g, fibre 2.5g, sodium 0.06g.

Price: 20.83 lei; that's the equivalent of €4.85/ ₤4.27/ $6.76.