Christmas market in Düsseldorf

Last weekend I made a quick trip to Düsseldorf with some friends to visit their Christmas market.
There were different mini markets scattered across town with stands selling Christmas ornaments, wool socks, crystal thingies, toys and many other trinkets. They also sell all kinds of typical winter/ German/ Christmas treats... We're all major food addicts so it didn't take long before it turned into a food fest :)

I'm sure you know sausage is big in Germany, so I let my vegetarian resolve go for the day (no judgement please). We started out with some gluhwein and waffles with cherries. That got us nice and toasty. This was quickly followed by a yummie curry wurst. Yes, I know it doesn't look to great but it tasted a lot better than it looked. We then stumbled upon peru kartoffeln, which is a stuffed baked potato with meat, shrimps or this odd combo of corn and cheese. We'd just finished the curry wurst so I didn't buy one, but I still regret not having tried the rundfleisch one :(

Nevertheless, a few meters down the road, our greediness didn't stop us from buying another type of sausage, krauter wurst... My curious eye then saw another stall selling 1/2 meter long sausages. They seemed ok, but a little on the tin side. So instead we tried some mushroom with krauter soße (mixed herbs sauce). I wasn't expecting it, but those were really yummmmm!

Somewhere along the way we had also bought some super cute lebkuchen and warm roasted chestnuts.
I love roasted chestnuts! They're nice and warm and although it's sort of sweet, they seem savory too.
In one of the quieter markets we came across this sweet gentleman who was smoking salmon on the spot. We were completely mesmerized. Before I knew it we had ordered a portion and were digging in. I'd never had smoked salmon that was smoked and cooked at the same time. It was really really tasty!

There were many stands selling brezeln aka pretzels. I always expect pretzels to be hard, but the good ones are nice and bread-ish on the inside with a salt sprinkled crust. They sell the good ones there! Besides the original pretzel they also sold pretzels with pumpkin or sesame seeds, cheese and even pretzels with sausage. Can't imagine what that would taste like. Although I once tried bagels with salted meat and that was really nice. It's not completely the same, but a little similar... right?

We finally took a break from all the Christmas fun and stopped at this super sweet cupcake shop Sugarbird Cupcakes. I had a chai tea latte and a tiramisu cupcake. The tea was a little on the weak side, more milk than anything else. But the cupcake was delish! Nice and soft and just sweet enough. They had some other cute looking cuppies as well. Hmmm... maybe I'll steal some ideas from them for my own Christmas sweets.

We had a great day that really flew by. There were many other cute and sweet looking things we came across. But oh well, you can only do and eat so much. Maybe I'll get another chance to try them next year.