I was reading Calvin Tomkin's New Yorker article about David Hammon. It relates the story of Hammon's famous snowball street action “Bliz-aard Ball Sale” in New York City, 1983, when the artist "placed a rug on the sidewalk outside Cooper Union, and laid out ten rows of perfectly formed snowballs in graduated sizes. Hammons and his snowballs stayed there all day, and, aside from Bey, who took a lot of pictures, the people who saw them were street merchants and passersby—local shoppers, women pushing baby strollers, art students and others, some of whom stopped to laugh, or to ask the price (a dollar a snowball, regardless of size), and in some cases—this being New York—to buy one."
Just to say that the reading enhanced my visit to the German bakery this Saturday morning, seeing beautiful "Schneeballen" (snow balls) laid out at the counter, sprinkled with powdered sugar. They were such a visual pleasure. "Is it filled with pudding?", I asked the bakery lady. "No," she said, "it's with vanilla cream... something in between pudding and whipped cream." She explained to me that they are only on sale from November till February. I felt like I couldn't miss out on this seasonal treat and it was definitely worth it.
The next day, Sunday morning, I found myself again at a bakery, now contemplating the Windbeutel (wind bags). They have a similar aesthetics to the snow balls, but they are with whipped cream and have more the looks of a sugar overdose so I decided to resist this time. I wondered if these Windbeutel are also seasonal. Maybe for hurricane season?