I made this for my mom yesterday and she loved it! This is the perfect recipe for those who lack the time to make an elaborate dessert, but still want to surprise/spoil their moms with something almost homemade. I say “almost” because you can buy some of the ingredients and avoid spending hours in the kitchen. For instance, I used store-bought cinnamon bread – if you have a recipe for it, let me know! 🙂 For the lemon pudding, I used my vanilla pudding recipe, with one small change: I replaced the vanilla extract with the juice and grated peel from half a lemon. I also made a simple strawberry syrup. All of these ingredients can easily be found at the grocery store, so you can buy them ready-made and use them to replicate this quick and easy sweet “sandwich” for you moms. A few ingredients can truly go a long way!
Ingredients
2 slices cinnamon raisin bread
2 tsp store-bought or homemade lemon pudding (see note above)
2 tbsp unsalted butter
2 tsp sugar
4-5 strawberries
1/2 banana
Whipped cream (optional)
Melt the butter in a pan over medium heat. When butter has melted completely, add the raisin bread and let it “bathe” in butter for a couple of minutes or until the slices are golden-brown, turning them half way through cooking. Take the slices from the pan and let them cool down on a plate.
While they are cooling down, wash and slice the strawberries and the banana and make the strawberry syrup. To make the syrup, take two sliced strawberries and put them in a small saucepan over a medium heat along with the sugar. Stir for a few minutes, until the sugar has dissolved and the strawberries have released their ruby juices. Take the saucepan from the stove and allow the syrup to cool down completely.
Take one slice of bread and spread vanilla pudding over it (I used a fork to do this). Put strawberry slices on the pudding, then top it with the second slice of bread.
Cut the sandwich in half and serve it as it is, with extra sliced fruit on the side… 
…or topped with plenty of strawberry syrup and/or whipped cream. We like to use both for a truly decadent dessert.
This is a convenient, economical and (last but not least) tasty dessert, which greatly benefits from the astringency of the lemon in the pudding. The lemon and the fresh strawberries cut through the richness of this “sandwich”, making it sophisticated in its simplicity and developed in its flavors. This is a dessert which paves the way to summer, and marries the cinnamony reminiscences of winter with the fruity vibrancy of the new hot season upon us.
Leave a Reply