Sunny, sweet, and tart. Best when the outside of the passionfruit is wrinkly and it feels heavy in the hand.
What do you do when the sun is out, but it’s frigid, with temperatures dropping and snow on the way? And you just need a little tart sweetness in your life?
You make passionfruit and lemon curd.
Floral. Sharp. Delicious.
Put it on a biscuit. Swirl it into yogurt. Eat it from the jar. Your choice.
Passionfruit and Lemon Curd 2 passionfruits 2 lemons (juice and zest) 3/4 cup sugar 2 eggs, beaten 5 tablespoons salted butter
Method In a medium-sized bowl, combine the guts of the passionfruit, lemon juice and zest, and sugar. Strain your beaten eggs through a mesh strainer to remove any stringy bits and add to the bowl. You could also strain the passion fruit guts if you like to remove the seeds, but the little crunch is nice so I leave them in. Whisk these ingredients together and set the bowl aside.
Melt the butter in a large sauce pan over low heat. Whisking constantly, add the egg and juice mixture to the saucepan.
Now is the fun part. Stand over the stove, whisking vigorously, for approximately 10 minutes until the mixture thickens enough to coat the back of a spoon. If you do not keep the mixture moving, you will end up with lemon-scented scrambled eggs. So put on a podcast, and settle in.
If your mixture does scramble slightly, you can always press it through a strainer after it’s thick. This will remove those passionfruit seeds, but that’s OK.
Refrigerate curd. It will thicken as it cools and become absolutely perfect. Best to eat this within a week, but you can also freeze it in ice cube trays and for use in smoothies or even as a swirl in homemade ice cream.
NOTE: You can make this curd with any citrus fruit. You may need to adjust the sugar depending on how tart the citrus is, but you’ll need between 3/4 and 1 cup of liquid for this recipe if using another citrus fruit.
FRIENDS. The Great British Bake-Off (The Great British Baking Show in the U.S.) has finished filming their next season, and GOOD LORD do we ever need some GBBO camaraderie.
The Great British Bake-Off is the nicest competition on TV. If you have been living under a rock, you might not know that this show pits 12 or 13 bakers in three specific tasks, one weekend a month for two months until the final baker is crowned the winner and receives…
A cake plate.
That’s it. All the final contestants get the same bouquet of flowers, but the winner gets a cake plate.
Yes, the winning spot comes with some amount of prestige and visibility, but the relatively low stakes means that these genuinely nice-seeming folks are supportive and wonderful with each other. There have been some controversial moments, but in general, the show has maintained its lovely manner.
The Great British Baking Show also gave us Mary Berry.
She likes to drink, and she eats out the side of her mouth, biting the fork every. Single. Time.
Annoying as hell, but one of the things she does that is incredible and revolutionary (besides knowing more about baking than most people forget) she calls the “all-in-one” method.
When it comes to cake, Mary Berry doesn’t cream the butter and sugar and then fuss about alternating dry and wet ingredients. She dumps everything into the bowl and beats the shit out of it, and it all works out fine.
This method, my depleted state, and my belief that we all really need a fucking break, has inspired this cake.
Also, the fact that I have excess citrus in my ‘fridge even though I am not a fan of citrus. You can use whatever you have, to taste.
AND. This cake comes together in less than ten minutes. Seriously. So like the lovely people across the pond, you could theoretically have fresh cake ready by teatime. If you are currently entertaining children at your home or trying to figure out WTF to do with them, this is a great cake for them, too.
Mixed Citrus Drizzle Cake
I am a big fan of using what’s laying around, especially now that going to the store is not always possible. This recipe is all about pantry ingredients. If you choose to use gluten-filled flour, don’t beat the cake batter as much or it will be tough. Otherwise, have at it.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter (or spray with cooking spray) an 8″ x 4″ loaf pan and set aside.
Ready? Dump all cake ingredients in one bowl and beat with a hand mixer (or a whisk – your choice) until it becomes light and fluffy.
Pour/shovel/scoop into prepared tin and smooth the top.
Place in oven and bake for 45-50 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean. Remove to a wire rack to cool completely.
While the cake is baking, dissolve sugar in the citrus juice. When the cake comes out of the oven, poke holes in the top with a skewer and brush, pour, or spoon the drizzle on top.
Let the cake cool completely in the tin, and then unmold. Sift powdered sugar on top before serving. If you’re fancy and want to be very British, melt chocolate (milk or dark) and drizzle on top instead of powdered sugar.
Recipe Notes
The citrus zest combo is all up to you. I used all grapefruit, one grapefruit and one orange, and lemon for this cake. Mix and match with whatever you have. You are looking for a tablespoon or two of zest for a nice punchy flavor.
Juice is also up to you. If you have straight orange juice, lower the sugar a tad to balance the sweetness. All lemon? Bump it up to make it sharp (as Paul Hollywood says) without searing off your tastebuds.
If I could put time in a bottle…it would look like this.
My Superfriend, Bonnie, previously mentioned in a post that featured her incredible Toasted Cashew Hummus, has been making fun of me lately.
I hadn’t seen her in awhile, the result mostly of her traveling to two different countries in the space of two weeks (and staying there, and knocking heads together when necessary, and co-authoring a paper on a new method for treating – curing? diagnosing? I can’t remember – tuberculosis) while still organizing childcare for two of her three children and dealing with a broken water heater from another continent.
In the midst of all of this, she had (rather foolishly and perhaps to her deep regret) committed to cooking me my Second Annual Birthday Dinner, just one week after she returned to the States. When I stopped by the Sunday before the dinner and she asked me how I was, I spoke the truth.
“I’m tired, ” I said.
She looked at me in a way that could only be described as askance. And can you blame her, really?
I am a freelance writer who teaches yoga and cooks for people. The actual hours I work every week vary greatly, but they don’t come close to the 40 that many others routinely put in. I am also living a child-free existence until June 10th, which means that “homemaking” consists of making sure the dog hair doesn’t get any higher than the bottom of the couch and the toilets are cleaner than a truck stop’s.
But I have been exhausted these past three weeks, drained and sleeping poorly and feeling anxious and sweating pretty much every little thing that my brain can make up to sweat.
This is where a caveat about how I know how much harder everyone else has it, and I shouldn’t complain usually comes in. And make no mistake: this is not a complaint.
I feel incredibly lucky that this morning I got to walk to a coffee shop in Baltimore’s beautiful spring blossoming. And after that I got to sit on the floor of a bookstore and leaf through cookbooks for an hour. And after THAT I got to walk through a sunshower of cherry blossoms raining on the sidewalk on my way home to meet Khristian, where we ate breakfast together and I made bread.
So there is no complaint here.
But there is something important here.
Even if I don’t have a full-time job, I am still allowed to be tired. I am still allowed to feel, as has happened in the past three weeks with multiple projects, overscheduled and understaffed. I know what it’s like to work 80-hour weeks and be a parent, and certainly my fatigue now does not have the same feel to it as that.
Sometimes, though, I just get tired. Tired of meetings every day. Tired of being “on,” and tired of a schedule. People sometimes dismiss themselves and their feelings because other people have it so much worse than they do, and while I think that in the big picture that is the best way to operate, that can be taxing day-to-day. It’s okay to own your struggle, your fatigue, your frustration, your anxiety – even if others have more cause to feel those things.
And again, I have to put in a plug for not only Superfriend Bonnie but also the other people I know, parents or not, partnered parents or not, who are killing it everyday and are SO. FREAKING. TIRED. also. I don’t know how you do it.
Still.
I just want to be at home, puttering, and today is a day for that. Today was the first day in awhile that has been unscheduled and unclaimed from the moment that stupid bird woke me up with the sun at 6:04 a.m. until I lay my head back down on the pillow and my millennial neighbors pick up their ill-tuned guitars and start wailing.
The best way I know to stop time when this happens is to put something up, and preserved lemons seem like the way to go.
It’s a simple process that nevertheless takes 30 days to bear fruit (ha). And every day you visit your lemons and give them a little shake.
For the next 30 days, even if I am busy or tired or have too much to do or have to be less of my normal introverted self and more of the extrovert that some of my jobs require, I can look at my little pint jar of sunshine-y time and remember that day I sat on the back deck for just as long as I felt like.
What helps you stop time? What reminds you to slow down?
