This is a weird-looking little cake with some cool packaging.

Every once in a while, I like trying new things.  And at the risk of sounding like a commercial, that’s what I feel like is one of the great things about Aldi…with their constantly-rotating weekly special buys, and their longer-standing seasonal ones, they always have a few things that I would normally never buy, that end up tempting me.

Then there are products that are so weird, I just have to give them a shot.  A good example would be Meiji’s Chocorooms, which are chocolate cookies in the shape of mushrooms, which Aldi sold a couple of years ago.  Or, there were also the Peanut Puffs, which were also a part of the Deutsche Kuche German line and tasted like Cap’n Crunch with no milk, and all forms of sweetness removed.

Well Deutsche Kuche is at it again, and this time it’s in the form of a cake that looks like it’s a tree!  Well, not exactly at first glance…at first glance it looks more like a children’s toy covered in chocolate.  But slice it open and voila; the inside resembles the rings of a tree.  In fact, baumkuchen literally translates to “tree cake”, information that’s readily available on the packaging, and that I found to be so simultaneously weird and intriguing, that I had to give it a shot.

First of all, you slice the cake as if it was a cake.  That may sound obvious, but if it wasn’t for the packaging, I’m not sure I would have known that.  So you slice it straight down, from the top, to the bottom.  It gets the appearance of “rings” from the manufacturing process:  Each “ring” is actually a very thin layer of cake; layers upon layers are applied until the cake reaches a desired height.  Most baumkuchen’s are made up of 15 to 20 layers, which looks to be around the number of layers we get in this one.

Tastewise, I wasn’t sure what to expect, but the closest American cake I could compare it to, would be a sponge cake; the cake itself doesn’t have a whole lot of flavor, so thankfully it’s all enveloped in a thin layer of chocolate, which acts as the “frosting”, more or less.  At first, it was more of a curiosity, as we didn’t know what to expect.  But once the flavors sunk in, our interest grew, to the point that we both agreed unanimously we would definitely get another one of these.

I mentioned that the cake doesn’t have much flavor, and believe it or not, that’s actually one of the things this product has going for it.  In a world where more is more, and desserts seem to be trying to outdo each other in pure sugar volume, this is a refreshing step in the opposite direction; a light, almost minimalist, dessert that still manages to satisfy without needing to resort to mountains of frosting, or a gooey chocolate center, or anything else of the sort, to be delicious.  The outer chocolate shell is semi-sweet, but not overly so, and it melts in your mouth the way a good chocolate should.  Good stuff.

Overall: 7.5/10.  While not something I could eat very often, this is a refreshingly simple, almost minimalist dessert that’s refreshingly light and delicious.  Layers of cake are smothered in a thin layer of milk chocolate that’s semi-sweet, but not too much so.  While the cake doesn’t have a whole lot of flavor (reminds me a bit of a sponge cake, to put it in American terms), it pairs very well with the chocolate coating.  Never judge a book by its cover, because this weird little cake started off a curiosity piece for my wife and I, but a couple of pieces later, ended up winning us over.