The weekend is when I have time to try out fun food — things that I actually love to eat. In most cases, it means desserts. Sometimes it means a nice breakfast. This past weekend, it meant pancakes, banananananana pudding and carrot cake!

Blueberry Pancakes

Main ingredients: flour, milk, eggs, blueberries.

Special flavorings: wildflower honey from Israel, baking powder. Easy to find, but since the Chinese rarely bake, I had to pay $4.41 for the imported stuff. Which only means I’ll be baking a lot more now.

Total cost: I’d say about 20 RMB ($2.94), mostly on the blueberries and eggs, for 14 5-inch pancakes, or just enough for Colin and me. For plain pancakes, the total cost would have been about 8 kuai ($1.18).

Banana Pudding!

Main ingredients: bananas, eggs, milk, sugar, vanilla wafers. I couldn’t be bothered to go to the Western food market (rain + laziness), so I subbed them with these almond shortbread cookies. They turned out to be a dark brown color, so the crumble on top of the pudding looks a bit like dog food :(

Special flavorings: vanilla extract. A 29-milliliter bottle of McCormick’s Pure Vanilla Extract is 55.50 RMB ($8.16).

Total cost: 60-65 RMB ($9) for about six servings. My special banana bowl cost 150 RMB ($22).

Carrot Cake with Orange Frosting (sorry, no picture)

Main ingredients: carrots, flour, confectioner’s sugar, orange.

Special flavorings: baking powder, ground cinnamon, ground ginger, grated nutmeg. I guess the Chinese use ground ginger because that was cheap and came in a small packet. The grated nutmeg, though, came at U.S. prices.

Total cost: About 30-35 RMB ($5) for four mini-bread loaves.