It's easy enough to find a bad Zimtschnecke, or cinnamon roll, in Vienna. Indeed, if the choice was between eating a generic flat and rather wide and cumbersome Viennese Zimtschnecke and not eating a pastry at all, even I, dear reader, would just as sooner go hungry (or perhaps, more realistically, choose something else to snack on). My complaints about them are two-fold. The texture is neither one thing nor the other: neither flaky nor chewy, but rather nondescript. The same goes for its taste, in fact, which surprisingly is not that of cinnamon but rather nothing at all. After eating a Zimtschnecke, one cannot help but feel that there's been no reward for your caloric consumption and that it fails to deliver what the name suggests. (In some ways, these complaints mirror those I have of American cinnamon buns: too big, too sweet, too doughy, too wet, too heavy, and finished with some teeth-achingly tangy cream cheese schmear. And don't get me started on the ones that comes from the tube--)
Thus it seemed (and perhaps here I should apologise for the overly-negative tone of the first paragraph) as if the Zimtschnecke from the Viennese bakery chain Der Mann was a manna from heaven when I came across it a couple of months ago. It was unlike any Zimtschnecke that I had seen in Vienna to date. Baked in a long and very narrow rectangular tin, one cinnamon roll wide but perhaps ten deep, each Schnecke was about an inch or so high, fairly substantial in appearance though not overwhelmingly so, and bedecked with a glaze made from icing sugar, cream and cinnamon. The best way I can describe it is to say that it tastes as I wish an American cinnamon roll would but never does. The buttery dough is soft and chewy but with crisp edges that have some resistance. The cinnamon flavour is clear and present without being in some sense confrontational. The icing provides creaminess and sweetness without smothering the pastry in a blanket of sickly goop. It was, suffice it to say, one of the best things I've ever had from a Viennese bakery. There are branches of Der Mann all over Vienna but the one on Perfektastrasse, adjoined to its factory, is the mothership.
