Passion Fruit Meringue Tart

My friend passed me some passion fruits a while ago as her family had a tree in their backyard. I love passion fruit, and I immediately knew I wanted to make a dessert with them.

Passion Fruit Meringue Tart

Passion fruit bars

I'm happy now that I've found a couple of pals who loves sour goodies like I do. It means that I get to experiment more with some of my favourite mouth puckering fruits like lemons, limes and passion fruit and knowing that there'll certainly be willing "guinea pigs" for me. Heh.

We recently celebrated one of the sour fruit lover pal's birthday, and I decided to make some passion fruit bars for dessert. The first recipe I tried failed me (and failed me big time - that's a waste of butter and eggs!!! :( how depressing, I hate wasting ingredients, especially when food prices are constantly increasing.) and so I took a step back and went for the old lemon bar recipe I found back in my university days.

Passion fruit bars

Passion fruit ice cream

Right after my last passion fruit post, I was craving for more passion fruit straight away. In fact, when I was making those passion fruit tarts, I was already planning for the next passion fruit dessert - passion fruit ice cream. I was planning to find fresh passion fruit from the supermart so that I get the lovely passion fruit seeds in my ice cream too. Alas, whenever you're specifically searching for an item, it will invariably bound to be not available at that very moment. Other times, it will just be there in the supermart, mocking and tempting you. Anyone feels the same way?

Passion fruits from a lovely girlfriend's vine makes...

Bourke Street Bakery's Passion Fruit Tarts

I'm trying to clear out some of the freezer goodies and there's still a huge 1L tub of passion fruit puree in there. I've only used it in the coconut mango passion fruit macarons here and mango passion fruit verrines here. I thought that I should do something that let the passion fruit flavour shine on its own. So here's my take on the Bourke Street Bakery's Passion Fruit Meringue Tarts.

Bourke Street Bakery's Passion Fruit Tarts (sans meringue)

French buttercream for macarons and cupcakes

Oh wow, and it's now the last day of 2010. Thank gosh. I must say that it hasn't been a very good year for me...but oh well, as long as I'm well-fed (too well-fed in fact), healthy, alive, I really shouldn't be mumbling or grousing much...

2010 has been a tremendously busy year for my oven, and sadly, it finally gave up on me (or was it the other way round hmmmm...), so we replaced it with a new one! I must say that I'm falling more and more in love with the new one day by day. It takes only 10 minutes pre heating time (compared to 20-30 minutes for the ol' one!), the temperature is reasonably correct (the ol' wonky one was off by 10 degrees higher!), oh oh oh, new things always seem so much better, shinier and prettier, don't you think so? (:

Coconut mango passionfruit macarons

Mango passion fruit panna cotta verrines

I'm a huge passion fruit lover. Singapore's a tropical country with loads of fruits available at all times of the year as we import a lot of fruits from all over the world (from neighbouring Asian countries like Malaysia, Thailand, and China to further countries such as USA and Australia etc). Ironically, I think I started noticing passion fruit only when I was studying in Australia. As I do my own groceries when I was studying there,  I noticed immediately when the wrinkly brown fruits started appearing at the fruit stall. I remember buying pre-packaged packs of six/eight passion fruits and scooping out the yellowy pulp and eating it with my granola and yogurt for breakfast.  The sour-y tang of the passion fruit, and the crunchy bite that the seeds always perked up my simple breakfast meal.

I've been on the look out for passion fruit puree for the longest time ever, and when I finally bought a tub of frozen passion fruit puree, I was so excited at the possible desserts I could make - macarons, ice creams, mousses etc etc. After browsing through all my bookmarked recipes, I finally settled on making mango passion fruit panna cotta verrines, inspired by Vi's (L' Atelier Vi) version here.

Mango passion fruit panna cotta verrines

Mogador macarons

As mentioned in my recent macaron post, I first started experimenting with using the Italian method of making macarons for this batch of chocolate passionfruit macarons. After hearing from Allie how easy the Italian method was, I was tempted to try it out cos my latest attempts at macaron making here and here produced less than desired looking shells. I had a list of potential macaron flavours I wanted to make (yes I do have a list specifically for just macarons, in fact I have several lists of "to-makes", categorised accordingly as "Tarts", "Entremets", "Ice-creams", "Panna Cottas"...you get the idea), and the very flavour topping the macarons list was Mogador. So, what should a girl to do, but dive straight into the fray.

Summery Mogador macarons