Knoppers

Brand: Storck

Cost: 11.90KR for 3

Found at: Willy:s

Emil drinks dark coffee. Not Christian Bale’s Batman dark (where you drink it and think, “wow, that’s pretty heavy”) but something more akin to Grave of the Fireflies dark (where you take a sip and want to start crying). It’s the kind of coffee you can’t shake – a bitterness that lingers with you for the rest of the day and makes it difficult to sleep.

I do not like this type of coffee, in part because I am an American: when I think of dark coffee, I think of something more like the Addams Family: dark, but also sweet. You can call me basic if you like, but I even enjoy myself a good mocha frappuccino or a caramel macchiato. I like the rom-coms of the coffee-movie analogy – something sweet and light and probably bad for you in the long run. Coffee is not meant to pull you through the day, but to launch you into it on a sugary energy high that lasts about an hour.

And that is where this German snack comes in. This cookie comes in a roughly 2x2inch square made of stacked layers of wafer cookie, chocolate, milk cream, and nougat and the taste is roughly equivalent to Nutella toast. It is mild and inoffensive and as far as sweets go, it is pretty, well, boring. I would never go out of my way to eat one. But that is because this is a coffee snack: it’s not meant to be ground-breaking, it’s just meant to be sweet. It’s designed to be eaten with your coffee to cut some of that harsh bitterness and give you that sugar rush that European coffees so lack.

Broadly speaking, Americans like their sugar in their coffee and Europeans like their sugar next to their coffee. But no matter how you mix your sweet and bitter flavors, I find that the end result is always the same: the one is always better with the other. Which isn’t a bad way to live life, come to think of it.

Though I’m not giving up my S’mores Frappuccino, no matter how sweet they make it.