Rhubarb and liquorice

Early in our trip, I added a couple of kg to our luggage at Ostseebär, the quirky jelly-baby store in Heiligenhafen. My eyes lit up when I spotted the magical word “Rhabarber” (rhubarb) there on one of the first packs I saw on entering the shop and a bag of those sweets immediately found its way into my shopping basket.

They are actually rhubarb and elderflower flavour and very yummy indeed. As you can see, more packs followed into my basket, including the other particularly yummy chilli-ginger bears. But it was the rhubarb flavour that heralded one of the flavours of the trip.

Because in this part of Europe, at this time of the year, rhubarb is very much the flavour of the moment.

So, whether it was at breakfast, when my customary yoghurt and granola was usually enhanced with a spoonful or two of rhubarb compote, or looking at the drinks menu where rhubarb juice was usually one of the choices on offer, we were both thrilled to enjoy one of our favourite flavours almost everywhere we went.

Even in the Aarhus station 7-11, where it took a more prominent place in the fridge than other, more globally recognised brands which I will leave you to guess!

I already mentioned how the first thing we saw on that station when we’d parked the car was our favourite liquorice brand, from where we collected a couple of tasty samples. That’s because another of our favourite flavours is liquorice, something the Scandinavians do incredibly well and definitely a product we’d looked forward to finding.

Wherever we went, there was usually a pretty good choice, too.

Here, we can find more sophisticated (?) liquorice products than those we usually find at home. Liquorice allsorts have always been a favourite, together with my Daddy’s favourite Pontefract Cakes, named after the Yorkshire town of their manufacture at the time. Liquorice was very much one of the flavours of my childhood.

So it was interesting to see one of our English favourites there amongst the Scandinavians (I didn’t realise Panda is a Finnish brand).

It was there in the ARoS gift shop where I spotted both rhubarb and liquorice on the same shelf though. Sadly, by this time I was more conscious than ever that these heavy bottles need to be carried home, so much as I would have liked to have put a bottle of each in my shopping basket, the photo had to do.

We all have our limits however. Salty liquorice flavoured dates? Not only am I not so much of a fan of salty liquorice, in my opinion this was taking a favourite flavour just one step too far.

I bought a dozen Medjool dates from the greengrocer yesterday though and confirmed that they needed absolutely no enhancement whatsoever. I now need to buy replacements for the recipe I had planned to make with them…