Efteling is a fairytale-themed, 73-year-old amusement park in the south of the Netherlands that, after two consecutive years of visits, has become an acute obsession among my family. We love the vaguely folk-horror animatronic trees, witches and giant sea monsters lurking within a labyrinthine real forest. We love the anthropomorphised talking bins that plead (in a haunting, perpetual sing-song) for crumpled pieces of paper to be shoved into their suction-powered mouths. We love the inventive rides that, variously, judder along rattling wooden tracks, plunge cursed pirate ships into water, or nudge gondolas serenely through sylvan scenes of bum-flashing goblins showering beneath waterfalls.
But our very favourite thing about the place might well be the poffertjes stand, a perennially busy kiosk where exhausted families gather for dinky paper boats filled with these yeast-puffed and sugar-dusted miniature buckwheat pancakes that are a Dutch institution. Made to order in a vast, uniformly indented pan, speared through their light, custardy middles with toothpicks and served with a thick swoop of pale butter, they always prompt an acute, grunting sort of shared pleasure and succour. Poffertjes (pronounced a little like “poffeh-tyuss”) are the dangled prize for the four of us; a reliable salve to the jittery overstimulation-loop that only themed leisure environments can provide. When we cajoled the blubbering eight-year-old on to a haunted house attraction that then promptly broke down (I imagine this tale will be tearfully described to a therapist one day), a shared portion of a dozen, ethereally warm poffertjes was how we chose both to apologise and collectively soothe our jangled nerves.
