Italian sprinkles

My parents in law from Italy are staying with us for a couple of weeks. Today, my daughter was telling her grandmother what she had eaten in school:

Mi sono mangiata un panino col formaggio e un panino col… come si dice ‘hagelslag’?
[I ate a sandwich with cheese and a sandwich with… how do I say ‘hagelslag’?]

OK, so ‘hagelslag’! How do I say this in Italian? I have no clue. And I never really paid attention to how we call it at home. It’s probably something like: ‘mi passi l’hagelslag?’ [can you hand me the hagelslag?]

I tried Google Translate:

‘Spruzza’

It doesn’t ring a bell. Let’s do a little test with my mother in law:

Me: ‘mi puoi dire cos’è ‘spruzza’? [can you tell me what ‘spruzza’ is?]
She: ‘si, quando hai per esempio una bottiglia di profumo che spruzza’ [yes, when you have a bottle of perfume for example and you spray it]

She moves her hands to show how it sprinkles. Nothing even close to ‘hagelslag’. I do a Google Image search for ‘spruzza’. I get images of perfume bottles and sprinklers. When I google ‘cioccolato spruzza‘ I get some images of donuts with chocolate sprinkles on them. At this point my best guess is that ‘spruzza’ Google translates ‘hagelslag’ to ‘sprinkles’ (which seems correct), but then to ‘spruzza’ (which doesn’t seem correct)…

I try my father in law:

Me: ‘mi puoi dire cos’è ‘spruzza’? [can you tell me what ‘spruzza’ is?]
him: si, quando vaporizzi un liquido [yes, that’s when you vaporise liquids]
me: ‘e nella categoria degli alimenti?’ [and in the food category?]
him: no, niente, forse quando spruzzi l’acqua [no, nothing, maybe when you spray water]
me: ‘e il cioccolato spruzza?’ [and chocolate spruzza?]

It’s getting ridiculous! He has no idea what I’m talking about. Not even when I show him the image search results from ‘cioccolato spruzza’. He says: non mai sentito dire ‘cioccolato spruzza’. Quelli sono i granelli di cioccolato’ [I have never heard of ‘cioccolato spruzza’, those are ‘granelli di cioccolato’]

OK, so at least I found the right Italian word for ‘hagelslag’! It’s called ‘granelli di cioccolato’!

When I search this in Google, I find this website: olandasupermercato.it .

They also sell chocolate sprinkles, but they are pretty overpriced. Good thing the real Dutch families bring their own ‘hagelslag’ when they go on holiday 😉

Now the hagelslag-mystery is solved, I just need to do one more thing:

Maybe Google actually learned something from me today…