passionfruit – Baking with Gab

Mango lemonade and Summer drinks

Summer is definitely here. After a bit of a stormy start, Summer has reared it’s glorious head. I got burnt yesterday at the beach; I applied sunscreen (patchily, as it turns out) and have awkward sunburn patches on my back and legs.

On top of the 30+ degree weather, this sunburn makes me feel like I’m melting! I had a box of quickly ripening mangoes and was in need of something refreshing, speedy and healthy to ease the pain of the sunburn. This mango lemonade ticks all of these boxes and it tastes like a little bit of heaven. I’m in love with it. Continue reading “Mango lemonade and Summer drinks”

Anzac day and passionfruit mint cocktails

I’ve already posted an Anzac biscuit recipe. It’s my dad’s recipe and they are delicious. He’s in the kitchen making them as I type. The smell of melted butter combined with the oats and brown sugar is such a simple delight. The mixture is to die for, raw or baked.

Instead of posting another Anzac-based recipe, however, I’m sharing a cocktail today. Sharing a drink with friends is so deeply ingrained in the Australian culture, that I’m pretty sure my entire long weekend consists of pub catch ups.

This cocktail is a far cry from the usual macho feel of Anzac day, where beer and two up are king, but it’s a gorgeous way to brighten up your rainy Anzac day. I also got most of my ingredients from my farm visit last weekend, so this cocktail is a little celebration of Australia in a glass.

With fresh, zesty flavours, it’s also pretty delicious. Enjoy your Anzac day!

Passionfruit mint fizz:

Makes 4 cocktails

8 passionfruit
5cm chunk of ginger
2 small lemons, juice and zest
1 cup sugar
1 ½ cups water
White rum
2 cups soda water or lemonade

Slice the skin off your ginger, then score it lightly to ensure it releases lots of flavour. Pop the ginger in a heavy based, medium-sized saucepan with the passionfruit pulp and seeds, juice and zest of the lemons, sugar, and water.

Put the mixture of a medium heat and stir until the sugar dissolves. Set to one side to cool. You should end up with about 2 cups of syrup, which will make four cocktails.

When the syrup is cooled, pour about ¼ cup into a tumbler, add 30ml (or more) or rum and top up with soda water or lemonade. You can always omit the alcohol and serve it as a home made cordial if you please.

Enjoy!

Coconut raspberry cake with passionfruit glaze (and a big baking prize!)

Baking with Gab has its benefits. It gives me an excuse to cook and devour ridiculous amounts of delicious baked goods, it’s introduced me to the fantastic blogging community and it’s also created an outlet for my crazy dog lady tendencies.

And then there’s free stuff. It’s not very often that I host a giveaway, so when I do, I get pretty excited about it! The delightful people from the Cake Bake and Sweets Show have offered me a one day double pass to give away to one of my fabulous readers!

The Cakes Bakes and Sweets Show will be on at the Sydney Showground, Olympic Park on March 21-23, the winner can go on whichever day they want. Chef Duff, Dan Lepard, Adriano Zumbo and Eric Lanlard will all be there – you could be too!

There will be live demonstrations, fabulous stalls to buy baked goods and baking related products, and free tastings. FREE TASTINGS.

The ticket allows you entry into the live demonstrations – there are so many options I literally cannot choose which demos I want to go to.

To celebrate my excitement about the Cake Bake and Sweets Show, I threw a little tea party, because that’s what I do best! The coconut, raspberry and passionfruit cake is sweet, moist and perfectly suited to a nice black cuppa.

Coconut and raspberry cake:

1 cup coconut cream
¾ cups caster sugar
2 eggs
1 ¾ cups self-raising flour
1 cup of desiccated coconut
½ cup frozen raspberries

Sticky passionfruit glaze:

¼ cup sugar
3 passionfruit
2 tbsp water

Preheat your oven to 180°C. Grease and flour a 21 cm cake tin.

Mix together the coconut cream and caster sugar until the sugar has started to dissolve. Add in the eggs, flour and then coconut and mix until combined.

Gently fold in the frozen raspberries so that their colour doesn’t bleed out too much.

Pour the mixture into the prepared tin and pop in the oven for 40-45 minutes, until a skewer inserted into the middle comes out clean.

As soon as the cake is out of the oven, pop the sugar, passionfruit and water into a small saucepan and heat over a low flame until the sugar has dissolved. Keep stirring to ensure that the mixture doesn’t burn.

When the cake has cooled slightly, run a knife around the edge of the tin to free it up, then turn it onto a cooling rack. Turn the cake the right way up, poke holes about ¾ of the way into the cake with a skewer and then spoon the passionfruit mixture over the top, spreading it as you go.

You want the cake to still be warm when you’re pouring the passionfruit glaze over so that it seeps into holes. Aside from the taste, the great thing about the passionfruit glaze is that you can cover up the holes you poked in the cake earlier.

Allow the cake to cool completely before serving.

How to win:

To win the tickets, you must like Baking with Gab on Facebook and then email bakingwithgab@gmail.com, telling me which part of the show you want to see most and why. Have a look here to see what the Cake Bake and Sweets Show has to offer.

Entry is open to anyone, but you must be able to make your own way to the show. Competition close Thursday March 13^th at 11:59pm.

Looking forward to seeing your answers!

Melting moments and surprises

I always thought that melting moments would be super tricky to make. It wasn’t until late last year that I came to realise just how easy they are. And I was pleasantly surprised! This recipe produces beautiful, soft little biscuits which (as the name suggests) melt away in your mouth.

Mid-way through making these alabaster beauties the front door-bell was rung quite fiercely. I broke away from rolling the dough and answered the door, doughy-handed. I’ll cut out the boring bits (like polite chatter with the mailman and the unwrapping) and tell you that in the big box that arrived with the mailman came my very own KitchenAid mixer. For whatever reason, the Boy took it upon himself to surprise me with it! I’m amazingly grateful… and super keen to use it!!

Norman partook in the celebrations by attempting to eat the little packaging puffs. Then he spat them out, then tried to eat them
again. He ended up in the box full of them and made himself quite comfy!

I won’t gush any further, but it will hopefully feature in upcoming blogs. It’s so beautiful I could die!

I’m hoping it will also improve the quality of my baking (especially meringues, which are the bane of my life!)

Biscuits:

250g butter, softened
1 tsp vanilla essence
½ cup icing sugar
2 cups plain flour
1/3 cup cornflour

Filling:

60g butter, softened
1 passionfruit
1 – 1 ½ cups icing sugar

Preheat oven to 160°C and line a large tray with baking paper. If your baking paper is disobedient, dab a few spots of butter in the corners of the tray and use that to keep the baking paper down.

Cream butter, vanilla and icing sugar together until smooth and creamy – it should change in colour
slightly. Sift the flours into the butter mixture and mix until you get a soft dough. When you scoop a spoonful out of the mixture it should look like ice cream – solid, but soft at the same time.

Measure out heaped teaspoonfuls of mixture and roll them into small balls, lining them up on the baking paper as you go. Don’t worry if the balls aren’t perfect, they’ll smooth out even further when they’re in the oven.

When you have a tray full of soft doughy spheres, grab a fork and use it to lightly flatten them, pressing a pattern into them as you go. To avoid messing up the pattern or the smooth dough, pull the fork out towards you after you’ve pressed them down.
Bake for 15 minutes and make the passionfruit filling while they’re in the oven. Beat the butter and icing sugar together, then mix in the passionfruit pulp. Take the biscuits out of the oven and transfer the biscuits to a wire rack to cool. Even if they don’t look done after 15 minutes, they are – you don’t want them to brown like you generally would a biscuit, these biccies are beautiful and pale. Once the biscuits are cool spread a teaspoon of passionfruit filling onto one biscuit and sandwich it with a second.