Ever cooked Berliners?

A Berliner Pfannkuchen is a German doughnut with no central hole, made from sweet yeast dough fried in fat or oil, with a marmalade or jam filling like a jelly doughnut, and usually icing, powdered sugar or conventional sugar on top. They are sometimes made with chocolate, champagne, custard, mocha, or advocaat filling, or with no filling at all.

The yeast dough contains a good deal of eggs, milk and butter. For the classical Pfannkuchen made in Berlin the dough gets balled, deep-fried in lard, whereby the distinctive bright bulge occurs, and then filled with jam. The filling is related to the topping:[citation needed] for plum-butter, powdered sugar; for raspberry, strawberry and cherry jam, sugar; for all other fillings, sugar icing, sometimes flavoured with rum. Today the filling usually is injected with a large syringe or pastry bag after the dough is fried in one piece.

Today, Berliners can be purchased throughout the year, though they were traditionally eaten to celebrate on New Year's Eve (Silvester) as well as the carnival holidays (Rosenmontag and Fat Tuesday). A common German practical joke is to secretly fill some Berliners with mustard instead of jam, especially on April Fool's Day, and serve them together with regular Berliners without telling anyone.


The jelly-filled krapfen were called Berliners in the 1800s, based on the legend of a patriotic baker from Berlin who was a field baker for the Prussian regiment after he was turned down for military service. When the army was in the field, he "baked" the doughnuts the old-fashioned way, by frying them over an open fire. According to the tale, the soldiers called the pastry Berliner after the baker's hometown. The term Bismarcken (for Otto von Bismarck) came into use by the end of the 19th-century.

Immigrants from Central Europe settled in the United States in large numbers during the 19th-century, and jelly doughnuts are called "bismarcks" in some parts of the Midwestern United States, Boston, and Alberta and Saskatchewan in Canada.

The terminology used to refer to this delicacy differs greatly in various areas of modern Germany. While called Berliner Ballen or simply Berliner in Northern and Western Germany, as well as in Switzerland, the Berliners themselves and residents of Brandenburg, Western Pomerania, Saxony-Anhalt and Saxony know them as Pfannkuchen, which translates literarily and wrongly to "pancakes". A pancake in the rest of Germany is indeed a Pfannkuchen, in Southern Germany sometimes called Palatschinken. The people of Berlin call their pancakes Eierkuchen, which translates to "egg cakes".

In parts of southern and central Germany (Bavaria), as well as in much of Austria, they are a variety of Krapfen (derived from Old High German kraffo and furthermore related to Gothic language krappa), sometimes called Fastnachtskrapfen or Faschingskrapfen to distinguish them from Bauernkrapfen. In Hesse they are referred to as Kräppel or Kreppel. Residents of the Palatinate call them also Kreppel or Fastnachtsküchelchen ("little carnival cakes"), hence the English term for a pastry called "Fasnacht"; further south, the Swabians use the equivalent term in their distinctive dialect: Fasnetskiachla. In South Tyrol, Triveneto and other parts of Northern Italy, the food is called kraffen or krapfen, while in the southern parts it can be referred as bomba or bombolone.

In Slovenia it is krof; in Portugal it is "Bola de Berlim" (Berlin Ball); in Croatia it is krafni; while in Bosnia and Serbia it is called krofne. In Poland they are known as pączki, in Ukraine as "pampushky [uk]"; and in the Czech Republic as kobliha. In Hungary, it is called bécsi fánk, meaning Viennese doughnut, as it was transited by Austria to the Hungarian kitchen. The pastry is called Berlinerbol in the Netherlands and Suriname, Berlijnse bol and boule de Berlin in Belgium, hillomunkki or (glazed) berliininmunkki or piispanmunkki in Finland, berlinerbolle in Norway, Sufganiyot in Israel, Berlínarbollur in Iceland, šiška in Slovakia, and gogoși in Romania. In Denmark it is called "Berliner". In Turkey, they are known as Alman Pastası (German Pie). All of these are similar preparations.