Having said all that, I do like fruit, but more so when not just eaten as it comes but transformed into something a bit more interesting. This week I have been to my parents house and picked gooseberries, blackcurrants and raspberries, and needed to discover something to do with them.
The raspberries were eaten by the kids, and added to my breakfast cereal and yogurt. The gooseberries and blackcurrants were partly used to make a Nigel Slater recipe: gooseberry and blackcurrant crumble cake. He suggested a few fruits that would work, including these two, but his final version was made with just gooseberries. I decided to use half and half gooseberries/blackcurrants. You make a sponge with ground almonds in, and before cooking it top with a layer of fruit and a layer of crumble mixture. It worked fairly well, but was a bit overdone around the edges, I think it would have benefitted by having some brown paper tied around the outside of the tin with string, like I do with Christmas cakes. It tasted good though with a cup of tea, once I had cut off the very outside edges. I might try it with cream later too.
The title of this post was also inspired by another recipe of Nigel Slater's that I discovered the other day - passion fruit creams. Passion fruits are sometimes the fruit that nobody knows what to do with, and lots of people seem to not like them. Maybe it's because they're a bit "perfumed", maybe it's because they have quite big seeds and you might not know whether to eat them, or they're a bit too crunchy. It might be because people eat them under-ripe and not sweet enough. You can tell when a passion fruit is ripe because its outer skin goes from smooth to dimpled like a golf ball. I find it takes a good week after buying them from a supermarket for them to be properly ripe. The first time I used passion fruit in a recipe was last year, when I made a passion fruit tart with coconut pastry, and also a lemon and passion fruit tart. Since then I've used one together with strawberries and cream to fill a "Wimbledon Cake" - on the cover of Mary Berry's Baking Bible if anyone has that book - oh, and I had one on my weetabix, which worked really well, and that's about it, until today.
A nearly ripe passion fruit.
The passion fruit creams were easy to make, you halve them and scoop out the seeds and pulp into a sieve over a jug, scraping as much of the juice and pulp through the sieve with a teaspoon, leaving the seeds behind. This took rather a long time, and I hoped the end result would be worth it (and it was), but I got 100ml of juice from eight passion fruit, leaving a lot of seeds left behind. Some of them got added back to the dish later, but most were composted, which seemed like a bit of a waste when they are edible, but while a few for a little bit of texture are nice, too many would have spoilt the finished dish.
Then you boil cream and sugar together for a few minutes, and add some lemon juice and some of the passion fruit juice, cool and pour into tiny espresso cups. I bought some cups really cheaply on ebay ages ago and had been waiting for a recipe such as this to use them! Then after putting a few seeds back into each one for texture and interest, and refrigerating for a few hours, they are served with more passion fruit juice poured on top, to mingle with the creams when you eat them. My daughter and her friend have just tried one and they got the thumbs up.
You might have noticed the title says "Part 1". Part 2 is going to be about what I do with the rest of the gooseberries and blackcurrants. Any suggestions gratefully received!
To be continued...
Thank you for reading.
Caroline :-)
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