Hi Everyone,
This week I am delivering on a promise I made a couple of weeks ago – to share with you a recipe for a pudding using passion fruit. It is a pudding I am confident many will be sure to enjoy.
Desserts can easily become an afterthought during the holidays and that is because our senses become inundated with the heady flavours of cinnamon, cloves and ginger in sweet and savoury dishes and in the many beverages we imbibe. Our default dessert is the much loved, boozy, fruit laden cake-like-pudding we call Christmas cake or Black cake. Let’s be honest, the intense richness of that cake quickly saturates our taste buds, and as we move from one home to the other, gathering for food and fellowship, many of us find ourselves shying away from Christmas cake; we’ve had our fill. It’s a good thing that the cake freezes well.
Adding another dessert option such as this Passion Fruit Pudding to your holiday table will offer you and your guests something fruity, seasonal, and refreshing on the palette. The tartness of the passion fruit along with its floral bouquet is such a delightful treat that helping yourself to seconds is expected.
Served warm, cold or at room temperature, this pudding reveals different elements of itself. When warm, the brightness of the passion fruit flavour is light and bright with a soft texture. When cold, the flavour is concentrated and the texture while tender is a little firmer. At room temperature, I find it just right in both texture and flavour. My taste testers had the opportunity to try the pudding at all three temperatures and their preferences came down to when they found the time to sit down and quietly enjoy the pudding. The one thing they all agreed on is that they are definitely making the pudding for the holidays. The recipe is simple and this is a pudding that you can make ahead and serve it as you please – warm, cold or at room temperature. My personal preference is at room temperature.
With Christmas over 2 weeks away, you have more than enough time to buy some passion fruit and store the pulp until you are reading to make the pudding.
Here are a few things to note about making the pudding.
- All the ingredients should be at room temperature or a little warmer; this will greatly help in the tenderness of the pudding.
- You will need an ovenproof bowl that has a 1.5
liter/6-cup capacity in which to bake the
pudding. If you don’t have such a dish then 6
smaller baking bowls or dishes can work.
- If using small baking bowls/dishes, place them
all on a baking sheet then add to the oven. The
cooking time will be reduced by approximately
10 – 15 minutes.
- When baked, the pudding puffs up just like a
soufflé, and it will deflate as it cools, this is
normal and expected.
- The pudding when baked is brown around the
edges and lighter in colour in the middle.
Passion Fruit Pudding
INGREDIENTS
- 6 ½ tablespoons/3 ¼ ounces of unsalted butter,
room temperature
- 1 ½ cups + 1 tablespoon whole milk, room
temperature
- 1 ½ cups white granulated sugar (1 ¼ cups if
using West Indian brown sugar)
- 3 eggs, room temperature
- ½ cup all-purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- ½ cup passion fruit pulp with seeds (see notes)
- Powdered sugar & mint for garnishing
(optional)
DIRECTIONS
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
- Butter baking dish (1.5 liter capacity) and set aside.
- Add the butter, milk, sugar, eggs, flour and baking powder to a blender or food processor and pulse until smooth and well blended.
- Pour in passion fruit pulp and give 3 quick pulses only to mix, you do not want to break up the seeds just to gently mix in the pulp.
- Pour the mixture into the prepped dish and transfer to oven. Bake for 50 minutes to 1 hour or until the middle is set.
- Transfer to a wire rack and cool. Serve warm (1 hour after it has been out of the oven) or at room temperature or cold with a dusting of powdered sugar and fresh mint if using.
NOTES
- If you prefer not to have the seeds of the passion fruit, then pass at least a cup full or more of pulp through a sieve to yield ½ cup of passion fruit juice. If you only use the juice, the pudding will naturally create its own sauce when baked (this is perfectly fine).
- This is a pudding to serve by spooning it onto plates or into small bowls. If serving cold or at room temperature, you can cut with a knife.
Cynthia
