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Selling the idea of a weekend in Vienna to our daughters was not easy at first. This was, we announced, the city of sumptuous chocolate cake, of dancing horses and of boys in sailor suits who sang like angels (respectively Sachertorte, the Spanish Riding School and the Vienna Boys Choir). With the triple attractions of cake, horses and boys, we went on, what self-respecting girl could possibly refuse?

It's fair to say that Alex and Rhena were intially doubtful about our sexual stereotyping. Being only six and five they thought that boys were pretty yucky, and as for horses....Rhena had recently had a close encounter with one that had mistaken her fingers for baby carrots.

The promise of cake was the strongest pulling point in the dads' three-point marketing strategy, but in the end it was rivalry with their elder siblings that made them keenest to go. Some weeks previously John and I had taken our firstborns away for a much-talked-about weekend to Paris, so it was only fair that the second-borns should go somewhere too.

Picking a European destination that was feminine was not so easy. Cities are not very gender specific, but we had settled on Vienna for its sense of the finer things in life, the period dressing, schmaltzy shops and princesses palaces - plus all that business with the cake, horses and boys.

But travelling with children of that age is always an unpredictable experience, so I should admit right now that the highlights of the weekend didn't quite turn out as expected.

We made a pretty good start with the cake. Vienna is the spiritual home of tea-rooms, here elevated to an art form. Given the time and the money the Viennese spend in these temples to torte - the Austrian equivalent of gateaux - it's amazing they don't all get slaughtered by the caffeine and cholesterol. The girls rejected a couple of the more bohemian venues on the grounds that they were too smoky, and they didn't go a bundle on the Sachertorte, a form of chocolate sponge which turned out to be quite dry. So we ended up in the Cafe Central, a confection of moorish arches, gilded ceilings, glittering chandeliers and mirrored walls, where we feasted on delicate pancakes filled with apricot jam.

After that, it was hard to keep the lid on the sweeties. Several places in the pedestrianised heart of the city specialised in a silky, creamy ice-cream, and if you steered the girls away from those you'd inevitably fetch up outside a shop with a fabulous display of delicate figurines - made entirely of marzipan. The only solution was to distract them with the street performers. Alex liked the living statue in the form of a cowboy, Rhena preferred the rock 'n roll puppets, and the two dads were super-impressed by a guy who played symphonies on wine-glasses half filled with water.

The Spanish Riding School produced a mixed reaction. Performances take place in a huge galleried hall in the imperial palace, where the muscular, groomed Lipizzaner stallions rear, prance and sashay in time to the music. It was beautiful, admittedly, but there was also something rather soporific about it, about the rhythm of the footfalls and the slow kaleidoscope of moving shapes that the animals created. Towards the end Alex pronounced herself bored and I caught myself trying to come up with a suitable answer to the question "how do you make a Viennese whirl?" Put torte in his tights, perhaps.

One thing was for sure: we were not going to emerge from the Riding School and walk unscathed past a line of elegant fiakers (coach and horses). Alex and Rhena were all revved up with horsey mania, so around the city we clippety went, with our womenfolk waving to the passing trams.

But the most successful item on our itinerary was the most unlikely, and it had nothing to do with horses, cake or boys. The giant Schonbrunn Palace was created for the empress Maria Theresa and her 16 children, and it looked pretty magical by lamplight. We hadn't come for the palace or its gardens, but for the evening performance at the Schonbrunn puppet theatre.

I have to admit that my heart sank when we learnt that the Marionettentheater's version of Mozart's Magic Flute was complete, unabridged, entirely in German and would last 21/2 hours - but we needn't have worried. There's something dreamlike anyway about the world of opera, and I'd forgotten children's innate ability to suspend belief. The girls were rapt by the strange magical land of singing wooden puppets on strings, of lovers, birdmen and enchanted animals - especially as they were invited backstage at half time to see how the whole thing came to life. We trooped back to the hotel with two very tired girls that night, and I am afraid that the Vienna Boy's Choir - scheduled for early the following morning - slipped out of the plan.

We quizzed the girls, on the way home, about the best bits of their weekend, half expecting mention of horses, boys, or cake. But they gave top marks to simply being there, in a stylish period hotel with adjoining rooms, having their own bathroom, and having their dads smuggle McDonalds into them in a pink carrier bag. Left to their own devices they would have had endless baths and then raced their fathers down to reception and back - with us piling down the stairs and them giggling madly as they overtook us in the glass-fronted lift.

For the dads, our highlight had to be the girls' excitement at being abroad and being with us; our lowest ebb was realising that the little blighters had discovered how to lock the minibar.

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