Banana Cocktail

Hello :) This time I have a very easy recipe for a banana cocktail. Once again I had a huge taste for bananas a not too much time. So I did this minute-thing . This cocktail should be drunk very fast when made, because bananas turns quickly kinda black and in this case there's no difference. You can experiment with spices in this cocktail, which pretty cool. Whatever you add, it'll turn out wonderful. You can't go wrong here. While I was drinking, my pet - a rat - wanted to taste the cocktail, too. I gave it a little and I had to put it back to it's cage, because it'd drink up the whole huge glass :)

The Daring Bakers' Challenge: Traditional British Pudding

 
The April 2010 Daring Bakers' Challenge was hosted by Esther of  The Lilac Kitchen. She challenged everyone to make a traditional British pudding using, if possible, a very traditional British ingredient: suet.

The required elements of this challenge were:
1) to make a suet pudding using real suet or as close a replacement as we can manage or is acceptable to us; and
2) to cook it by steaming or if we want to be even more traditional by boiling tied up in a cloth.

The Original Recipe Sources:
Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course, The pudding club, Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management and the Dairy Book of Home Cooking and Esther's family’s recipe notes!

So I´m here with this British pudding recipe. It's something special, because it's my first daring bakers' challenge! I´m officially a member, wonderful! However, let's get to the pudding. The pudding is made using suet, which is pretty hard to get here in the Czech Republic. To be honest, you cannot get it almost anywhere. Even though I went to try to get some in local butcher's. In fact I visited all of them, which means six shops. In four of them I was told this: "Oooh, that's something we DO NOT have!" I got really funny answers in the remainig two stores. Once again I asked about the suet and for the first time the answer was positive. I thought I won. At least until she asked me what I wanted it for. When I told her about the British pudding, she looked at me and said: "That must be extra fresh, mustn't it?" I nodded in agreement. And then she replied: "We don't have anythig fresh in here!" So that's absolutely perfect. Well, my question was the same in the last remaining store and the reply? Pretty odd: "We don't have anything like that. We don't sell meat!" So now I know there's no meat at butcher's :D Because of this I had to replace the suet with old ordinary lard.
We had some choices - whether to do a savoury pudding or a sweet one. I chose Sussex Pond Pudding. But I tried to go wild (as Esther suggested) and changed some stuff in filling :)

Cinnamon Blessings

This is a very old and traditional Czech recipe usually made during carnival which takes place every year in March. However, they can be made during whole year because they are pretty good :) The recipe itself is very easy and fast. I made them in the evening because I felt like eating something sweet yet crispy in the same time. Both the preparation and frying only take a few minutes. Thanks to the frying they become nicely crispy.

Strawberry Streusel Muffins

Hello everyone!
Today I have a recipe of strawberry muffins for you :) The reason for making them was the huge amount of frozen strawberries in my freezer. There was hardly any free space left, so I wanted to use them.
The muffins were really fantastic. I loved that pink dough (see photos). It happened thanks to these frozen strawberries - all the frozen water was red and mixed with the dough  turned out to be nicely pink. Next time I'd add even more strawberries to make the muffins even more strawberry.
Ou, yeah, this time I needn't have gone to the shop - nothing was missing :) It was without any problems.
I had a lot of fun during the preparation of them. Instead of having the amount of dough for a dozen of muffins it turned out to be for 24 muffins. But nevertheless, we ate them within two days. So good they were!