mutteringhousewife

I didn’t actually kill our passionfruit vine. It was a combination of strangulation by a virulent bougainvillea (that we had to pay someone to dig out before we lost a child in it) and a lawnmowing man with a short attention span who kept whippersnippering it at the base. In the fullness of time I shall pick a spot and plant another and possibly even water it occasionally, but until then I’ll just have to wait until the fruit shop is selling nets of them for five bucks a pop.

To make passionfruit muffins, one must first locate a recipe. You can skip this step, there’s one happening further down as you may have surmised from the blog title. Many recipes with fruit in the title are misleading, the fruit goes on top as decoration or in icing. I’m as happy as the next person to make passionfruit icing, but I like my flavour to go all the way through, and you shouldn’t be putting icing on a muffin anyway, that turns it into a cupcake. I’ve adapted this recipe from one I found in a slightly stilted article published in a range of New Zealand newspapers. My researches indicate that cooking with passionfruit may be a bit of a New Zealand thing.

Mix in a bowl the wet ingredients, which are one egg, sixty grams of melted butter, sixty grams of softened cream cheese, three quarters of a cup of milk and three quarters of a cup of passionfruit pulp. Today, that was six passionfruit. Add the dry ingredients, which are two cups of flour, four teaspoons of baking powder and three quarters of a cup of sugar, and after tasting these guys I’d also add a pinch of salt. Mix lightly, then fill up a twelve hole paper lined muffin tray. One day I must see how using squares of baking paper works, so I can pretend I’m running a cafe, but I still have about fifty of those accordion style cups, so I’ll use them up first. Get the batter in quickly, it seemed to be starting to react with the baking powder as I was spooning it in, I’m guessing because of the acidity of the passionfruit. Resist the urge to go and hang out the washing halfway through. Bake at one hundred and eighty degrees for twenty five minutes.

These have come out fairly cakelike, probably because of the extra fat in the cream cheese. I added the cream cheese in mainly because I thought it would be a nice flavour combination and I actually had some. They’re very light and not too sweet and I don’t expect them to last long.