White Gold Passion Cake

Great synergy of passionfruit, vanilla and white chocolate.

I still had some passionfruit left in the freezer from last year so decided to test out "Rose's Heavenly Cakes" for the first time with this recipe. As usual the recipes are crystal clear and flavour combinations are truly complimentary without making one ingredient stand out too much. She also seems to have the right sugar balance for my taste which is always a concern with American authors in particular.

The construction is a vanilla genoese split in half, passionfruit syrup brushed over it, passionfruit curd filling in between the two layers with a white chocolate and cream cheese frosting on the outside. Nothing terribly difficult but you do need a lot of passionfruit and plan ahead.

The thing I was happiest about was trying out Rose's genoese recipe which worked beautifully. Had no problems rising but I was worried it would burn once it rose over the top of the tin.

The centre did sink quite a bit so next time I might bake it for longer even though I already baked it longer than the maximum time recommended. When I cut off the crust before assembly it was still very moist so I could have baked it longer and I don't think it would have burnt.

The only problem I found with Rose's recipe was the advice on buying fresh passion fruit. She recommends buying fruit that "purple and wrinkled all over." I was sure that off the vine they are not wrinkled so I bought a few a did a taste test. For the three below none of them were very wrinkly and actually the smoothest one (on the right) was the sweetest. As I suspected the remaining ones simply became more wrinkled the longer they sat in my fruit bowl. Presumably they were drying out. Every fruit that I bought whether brown and wrinkly, dark purple and dimpled or reddish purple and smooth all tasted ripe. The real difference seemed to be their weight with the heavier ones naturally containing more seeds and juice.