When I was a child we had a passion fruit vine that consumed our garage. The garage, old and unused, was filled with broken tools and bald tyres. We could barely open the door as the vine curled its spring-like tendrils over the door handle. We had to cut a hole in the foliage to get in. The shed was covered with this mass of lurid green and in the summer it was dotted first with rose pink flowers and then elongated yellow fruit. Ripped open, they were gorgeously sweet and had that pungent, tropical scent. The vine was prolific, and passion fruit pulp had to be frozen in ice cube trays or made into curd to deal with the glut.
The banana passion fruit is now rarely sold as a fruiting variety. The small purple passion fruits are much more common. They have delicious seedy pulp. At the market look for heavy fruit. The skin of the passion fruit wrinkles as it ages but the fruit is often still good, even if wrinkled, but choose smooth skinned to assure the fruit is fresh.
Passion fruit is a necessary addition to a fruit salad, the pulp is commonly strewn over a pavlova, or in rural bakeries the passion fruit pulp is often added to icing sugar and used as a top for tarts or vanilla slices. These tarts are a modern take on this rural bakery classic. Using crème fraiche as the creamy centre is no fuss and offsets the sweet, aromatic passion fruit.
Sweet Passion Fruit Tarts
For the icing:
4 passion fruits, pulp
½ cup icing sugar, sifted
For the filling:
250g crème fraiche
3 tbsp shredded coconut, toasted
For the sweet shortcrust pastry:
280g flour
60g icing sugar, sifted
150g chilled butter, cubed
2 free-range egg yolks
In a food processor (or you can do this in a bowl, rubbing the flour, icing sugar and butter between your fingers) crumb the flour, icing sugar and chilled butter. Add the yolks and stop the processor (or kneading) when the dough comes together. Wrap dough in cling film, and refrigerate for an hour. The dough freezes well if you’d like to make it in advance, so it’s there ready when you want to start baking.
While the pastry is resting, combine the passion fruit pulp with the icing sugar, in a bowl, a little at a time, until you get a cream like consistency.
Once the pastry is rested, remove from the refrigerator and roll out carefully to .5cm thick. With a pastry cutter/knife/rim-of-a-glass cut the pastry into rounds and place the rounds carefully into a greased tart or muffin tin. Place the tart cases, in their tin, into the freezer for 10 minutes and then straight into a pre heated oven at 180C. Bake until golden. Let stand to cool.
Once the cases are cool, sprinkle a little toasted coconut into each tart case, then fill to each tart case with crème fraiche, smooth with the back of a knife. Drizzle the passionfruit icing over the top. Let the tarts stand until the icing sets.
Serve the same day.
