Hi, everybody,

Yesterday was the first day of Shrovetide here. In Russia it lasts the whole week. It goes back to pagan festivals in the 9th century. People here always fried pancakes (or bliny) for Shrove. They eat them with caviar, or salmon, or sour cream, or jam, or honey. The Russian bliny differ from pancakes because they are prepared with yeast.

Ingredients: 35 g of yeast, 1 litre of milk, 2 eggs, 2 tablespoons of sugar, 1 teaspoon of salt, flour, 1-2 tablespoons of oil or butter for flour. Some oil for frying.

Directions:
Dissolve the yeast in several tablespoons of warm milk, add a spoon of flour, add a pinch of sugar. Mix everything and let it stand for a while. When there appear some bubbles in the mixture, make a thin dough by mixing all the ingredients. The dough must be homogeneous. Then put the dough aside to stand into a warm place until it double its volume. Stir the dough. Let it stand again until doubled in size. Stir again and add 1-2 tablespoons of oil or warm butter. A frying pan (dia. 18-20cm) must be greased thinly and evenly. The real bliny must be fried on a frying pan made of cast iron.
A useful hint: the volume of liquid and the volume of flour are more or less equal.

In this way bliny are prepared by Ivan Kapran's granny