Is there any strong, well tested and general purpose puppet recipes-base to be used as starting point for customization?

I don't believe there is a "standard base" of puppet. Based on my own experience, mailing list conversations, and analyzing many of the recipe collections on the internets, it appears everyone has different enough requirements that they just use the existing collections as examples. That's how my deployment has turned out.

Have a look at the collection by David Schmitt http://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet/wiki/CompleteConfiguration . When I don't know how to do something, I turn first to David's repo and see how he achieved it. A few modules I have used directly, but mostly I use it for reference.

In practice with puppet you generally adapt other people's ideas and build your own modules tailored for your organization rather than trying to make general purpose modules that fit everywhere. The recipes are just that, starting points for you to hack away. There is no such thing as the "standard" configurations of a server - that said if you want to do it there is a good chance David has done it first.