The food: Crunchy Nougat Symphony Cake

Where to find it: Fassbender & Rausch: Chocolatiers at the Gendarmenmarkt, Berlin, Germany

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You saunter into the wonderland of Berlin’s Fassbender & Rausch Restaurant, Café and Chocolate Shop and a grumble billows from your belly. This grumble harkens back to your childhood past—a past filled with fireplace hot cocoa and gum drops. As The Simpsons said, Germany is the land of chocolate. Take the wonderment of Willy Wonka‘s chocolate factory paired with the decadence of Vianne Rocher’s French chocolate shoppe in the 2000 film Chocolat, and you’ll get a taste of what Fassbender & Rausch serves.

With the utmost in German efficiency, this nation knows how to compose a symphony of sweets. The chocolatiers at Fassbender & Rausch use razor-edge precision to craft this cake. Just like a German girl, on the surface the cake has a shell—both tough and composed. But on the inside it melts and reveals secrets some men would pay big money to discover.

Cracking open that shell, you find bliss and Berlin bigness inside. The chefs orchestrated dark Amacado chocolate and Amarena cherry held on a sponge biscuit. When you have a nation that boasts Beehtoven and one of the largest chocolate shops in the world at Fassbender & Rausch, then you know you await a symphony of sensations. Sure the state of Montana boasts a greater land mass than the nation of Germany. But when it comes to anything, whether it be politics, industry or chocolate, Germany—and especially its capital, Berlin—thinks big. So, make this foodie friday epic: switch on Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, pounce into your grand sofa and munch on a heaping chocolate bar. You deserve it.

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Check in on later Food Fridays to see Fassbender & Rausch’s Chocolate volcanoes and replicas of The R.M.S. Titanic, the Brandenburg Gate, the German Reichstag and the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Cathedral—all ginormous and all made entirely of chocolate.