Passion fruit slice

As mentioned in a previous post my mother has a small farm and she sends me home with oodles of produce which I have to somehow find a way to use! Poor me right? Just kidding. Anyway, she found passion fruit vines growing wild on her place, and so we pulled it up, and planted it in the garden and grew it over a trellis. After more than a year there was bright green fruit all over it, however, it just never seemed to become purple. There were many, many conversations along the lines of people telling mum that it must be an ornamental variety (which you can't eat), however, smart me tells her to wait for the weather to change (because it was many, many months of cloud, followed by rain, followed by cloud.....) and lo and behold, what happened.....we ended up with hundreds of passion fruit. Literally. Told you so mum!

So what to do with all this passion fruit??? Well I can promise you I ate about 60 or so myself cause I remember mum came over one day with 90 passion fruit, I tried to sell some off but no one was really interested so I ate about 60 and froze about 30. Did you know you can freeze passion fruit? Since passion fruit are expensive I would recommend buying them when they are on sale and freezing them in their shells. They freeze really well and when you defrost them you can't taste the difference and there is no change in consistency of the fruit.

Finally just a little note on the recipe, this is not a cake, its very much like passion fruit-flavoured shortbread with icing! 

Base
3/4 cup softened butter
1 cup icing sugar
1/3 cup passion fruit pulp
1 1/2 cups self-raising flour
1 cup cornflour
pinch salt

Icing
90g butter melted
2 cups icing sugar
2 tbs pulp

Method

Preheat oven to 180C. Lightly grease a square slice tin. For the base, cream the butter and sifted icing sugar until light and fluffy, then beat in the passion fruit pulp. Add the sifted flour, cornflour and salt and mix well to combine. Press into a prepared tin and bake for 30 min.

To make passion fruit icing, beat together the butter, sifted icing sugar and passion fruit pulp until smooth. Once slice is cool, top with icing and cut into small fingers, as they are quite rich!