The portrait painted by Anton Graff in the year 1791 set the popular image of the German poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller: pale, serious, his head crowned with locks of long, flowing, curly blond hair. When he died at the age of 45 in Weimar in 1805, his wife, Charlotte, cut two locks of his hair as a keepsake, as if he were a pop idol. The notoriety of Schiller and his locks gave rise in the late eighteenth century -- it is believed -- to a pastry named in his and his hair's honour: the Schillerlocke. Of its precise origin next to nothing is known, but at the very least the relationship between the shape and form of the cream horn and Schiller's wavy hair is obvious. In Austria and Vienna, the Schillerlocke is known as a Schaumrolle and is a slightly different shape. While the Schillerlocke is cone-shaped, a Schaumrolle is tubular like a cannoli, meaning the filling is able to escape from both ends. Another difference: while a Schillerlocke is usually filled with cream, a Schaumrolle typically has a meringue-based filling.
Making Schaumrollen at home usually involves starting with ready-rolled puff or flaky pastry, though if a person wanted to make it themselves, it would involve essentially layering butter in between a dough made from flour, egg yolks, lemon juice, water, and butter. Aside from the pastry, the other thing you'd need are Schaumrollenformen, which is to say, tubes or cones around which the rolled and cut (3 mm thick; 1-2 cm wide) pastry is wrapped while baked. After pastry-making and baking comes the assembly, during which the cooled cones are filled using a piping bag with a meringue-type filling, made by slowly pouring a sugar syrup into egg whites whipped with a little sugar and lemon juice, thus creating an Italian meringue in which the egg whites are pasteurised. Dust the Schaumrollen with icing sugar and they are ready to serve. Failing that, you can go to Bäckerei Schwarz and buy them from the bakery counter.
