The Gingerbread House

Deep in the dark forest Hansel and Gretel came upon a small cottage made entirely from gingerbread with a roof made of cake, and the windows were made of clear sugar. The local children call this chata the gingerbread house and ask their teachers to bring them here.

The chata belongs to a friend of mine and I was as pleased as any child to be invited there. It was built by her father and it is just perfect. The chata sits nestled into a bank, in front is a wide lawn down to a small river. All right, there's no plumbing and one electric point, but in some ways that is part of its charm it forces you to relax. And that's what I did. My friend and I sat outside , drinking tea and eating cakes and watched the world go by.

Lipno Sunset

I can't remember if I have blogged about this in the past, but I make no apologies if I have. I have developed a taste for sunset chasing.

Sometimes when there are enough but not too many clouds in the sky, I get this overwhelming urge near dusk to get in the car and drive to Lake Lipno and sit in awe as the sun goes down. I have dragged my sisters and my husband on these trips, but mostly I go alone. I simply cannot get over how lovely the sunsets are here. I have a photo album full of Lipno sunsets. Here is one of the most recent photos.

More on Czech Cakes

Further to my last post about making buchty, I hope your appetite is whetted for more about Cezch cakes. As I said Czech cafes often offer a wide and wonderful selection of cakes. Indeed I had a whole lesson with my Czech language teacher learning the various names of Czech cakes, and very useful it was too. Some are clearly drawn from the Viennese style - wonderful cream and fruit jelly confections called zaluseky, which demand the use of a spoon and fork - but others more obviously Czech in their origins.

One of the most common and most popular is the honey cake – medovy dort, although often named by the dominant brand Medovnik. This is is a light honey and walnut sponge, which sometimes comes with either extra honey or cream. Strudel (both apple and cream cheese) is also common, often coming with cream. Biscuits are called susenky, whilst piskoty are the type of biscuit you use in trifles. Sometimes you will come across a cross between a meringue and a biscuit shaped like a shortbread finger which is eaten with coffee and is called a coffin (after its shape). At Christmas you will find iced gingerbread hearts, houses, devils and anything else you can think of for sale on street stalls and in shops. Whilst at Easter there are the special Easter cakes – including a sponge cooked in a lamb-shaped mould.

The Czechs have a line in dough-based confectionery, these include the buchty of course, the plaited vanilkovka, and zavin (a longer version of buchty which slices). These make an excellent sweet breakfast.

I have only scratched the surface of the wonderful world of Czech cakes, you will just have to come here and try them for yourself.

Making Buchty

I am very fond of Czech cakes. And the Czechs are very good at making them, after all this is a country which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and so in addition to making Czech cakes are adept at Viennese cakes too. They are part of the Czech cafe culture which I have blogged about in the past.

Cakes are an important part of the Czech social scene. Visitors to the house, especially female ones, will often arrive carrying a tin or plastic box saying "I've been baking and I thought you might like one too." You open the box and there is enough cake to keep you going for weeks.

After three years in the country I decided it was time I had a go. Only I cheated and bought some cake mixes. I don't feel too guilty about it, there were an awful lot of cake mixes on the shelves at Tesco's in Cesky Krumlov, so it looks like many Czech woman cheat too. The first cake I made was a thin sponge with blueberries, which I have been given on several occasions by friends. The cake mixture is poured into a baking tray and the fruit (whatever is available - raspberries and red currants work well) is simply sprinkled on top. The cake is then baked in the oven until brown and cooked. The combination of fruit and sponge is lovely.

Encouraged by this simple success, I moved on to a more complex cake - the Czech buchty. The mix requires the addition of yeast and then being left to rise, which it did to rather alarming proportions. I then carefully flattened the dough out and cut it into squares. I put some apricot puree into the centre of each square, folded in the corners and rolled and pinched it in my hands to make a ball. These balls were put in baking tray and allowed to rise further. When they were ready I put them in the oven and baked them until brown. The result can be seen above. These, like the sponge, soon disappeared. As my husband pointed out: they needed to, they would only go dry!

Vyssi Brod Walk

Before I got distracted by Czech mushroom figures I was blogging about Vyssi Brod and promised to talk about a historic trail which starts and ends in the town. It starts next to the major tourist carpark and follows along the edge of the Monastery complex. It took about two hrs to do the walk, the guidebooks say one and half; well thanks to a summer storm there was a tree down on the path so I had to retrace my steps at one point which added time.

The trail takes you past a number of historic industrial features such as a quarry, water hammer, iron mill, and the water channel for the abbey. In addition there are a number of natural features such as a spring and the beautiful St Wolfgang waterfalls - a complex of small waterfalls in the woods above the town.

A Czech Obsession

I was amused to see that the Czech Ministry of Agriculture has just announced that in 2008 Czechs collected 2.7 billion crowns worth of wild berries and mushrooms from their forests. And 2008 was a bad year! I have blogged before of the Czech obsession with mushrooming and how I too have caught the fungus collecting bug, but the Ministry's figures certainly bring home the scale of the obsession - this is equivalent to 20,000 tonnes of mushrooms, 9,000 tonnes of blueberries and however many of blackberries, strawberries, and raspberries.

Back home in the UK, where mushroom collecting is a hobby indulged in by a small minority who are regarded as eccentrics with a dangerous hobby by the majority population, some conservationists have expressed fears that a small rise in British mushroom hunters will result in endangering British mushrooms. The Czech experience completely gives the lie to this. Here the forests are crawling with people with a whicker basket in one hand and a mushroom knife in the other and yet I have observed that Czech mushrooms not only spring eternal but also do so in far greater numbers than in the UK. My not very scientific evidence is supported by experiments carried out by scientists which have shown that mushroom numbers actually rise in areas which are harvested. I am therefore determined to continue to do my bit, both in the UK and in the Czech Republic, to help sustain the mushroom population (purely for conservation reasons you understand). Now where did I put my basket?

Vyssi Brod

Vyssi Brod is a small town to be found on the fledgling River Vltava just east of the Lipno Lakes and south of Cesky Krumlov. During the summer its banks are home to holidaying canoeists, in addition there are a number of tourists (many day visitors from nearby Germany and Austria) who come to visit the ancient abbey that dominates the town. And it was for this last reason that my husband and I made the short trip to the town.


The monastery was founded in the 13th Century but the current buildings date back to the 15th when the abbey was rebuilt following a disastrous fire. The monastery as the Czech guidebook has it "is the architectonic dominant feature of the town" - Czechs seem to be into architectonic dominants, as the phrase appears in several guidebooks - ie the building dominates the town.

Our first task was to get into the building. Visits to Czech buildings usually happen in guided tours, so you have to wait for one to go round, ideally one in English. Unfortunately for us we had just missed one, the next was in Czech and anyway was full up, so we had to wait for a German-language tour (we were given an English translation). This gave us an hour to waste, we therefore wandered into the main town, and away from the tourist trail. In the town square a children's theatre company were performing to a rapt audience. I wandered into the small tourist information office, where the staff looked shocked to see a tourist. They weren't expecting me, indeed every surface was covered with trays of cakes. Although looking for information was quite difficult, nevertheless I managed to find a leaflet about an industry trail which led from the abbey into the surrounding hills, - something I will blog about next time.

After a coffee we returned to the monastery and waited and waited. The coach of visiting Germans, who were to make up the majority of our party, had not arrived. Two hours after arriving at Vyssi Brod we at last stepped into the monastery sans German coach party. The highlights of the tour were for us the cloister gallery full of lovely gothic and baroque statues, the stunning library and the church itself. The Germans had arrived shortly into the tour and turned out to be a choir and were asked to demonstrate the church's wonderful acoustics by the guide. This they did and more than made up for the delay they had caused.


On leaving the church we stopped to look at part of the monastery which had not been restored. During the communist era the monastery had been allowed to decline into an appalling condition and we were shocked to see what had happened. Over the last two decades the monastery has been gradually been restored, often with money from Germany, as Vyssi Brod was very much a German monastery. On our return to the carpark I located the starting point for the historical trail, but that would have to wait for another day.