Passionfruit & Lemon Mini Cakes

These passion fruit and lemon cakes are more than a bite but less than a half dozen so. These individual butter cakes are injected with lemon curd for more zing and frosted with a simple passionfruit icing. And there's no better flavour for a rich butter cake than tangy lemon and passionfruit!

Despite the look of these, they are not friands. I just wanted to make individually sized cakes and the friand tin was the perfect size.

Although I seem to somehow married one of the few people that hate cake, Mr NQN surprised me with these. He really enjoyed them and said so which is a double surprise because he is fairly sparing in his compliments. I think it was because it is a moist butter cake and inside was a surprise injection of lemon curd in the centre.

I actually used some ingredients that were left over from a photo shoot I recently did. In a couple of months and over Christmas, nine recipes of mine will be appearing in shopping centres all over Australia! I'm so excited to share them with you and I loved the way that the photos and stop motion videos turned out! :)

As with a lot of food shoots there is a lot of food left over. But we were determined not to waste as much as possible. The photographer told us that stylists use hairspray to make a roast meats glisten but we didn't want for an enormous, beautiful ham to go to waste so we used olive oil spray and everything at the end was completely edible.

At the end of the shoot everyone got a package of food to take home from the ham, perfect berries, salads, microherbs, vegetables, seafood and sauces. Even the triple layer pavlova and the enormous ham bone found a home destined to be pea and ham soup.

I decided to use the leftover passionfruit from the triple layer pavlova and the edible flowers on these because I couldn't bear the idea of those tiny little flowers that were oh so expensive going to waste. I made lemon curd with the extra yolks from the pavlova and used lemons from a salmon dish. I loved making sure that not a scrap went to waste. And if you can make lemon curd and lemon cakes out of lemon then that's a pretty good result of being given lemons I guess! ;)

So tell me Dear Reader, are you very conscious about waste? Do you have any tips for reducing waste? Do you tart like flavours like passionfruit and lemon?

Passionfruit Lemon Mini Cakes

An Original Recipe by Lorraine Elliott

Preparation time: 25 minutes

Cooking time: 25 minutes

Makes 10 (depending on the size of your tins)

• 125g/4ozs. butter, softened
• 1/2 cup caster or superfine sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 2 eggs, at room temperature
• 1 1/4 cup self raising cake flour*
• 1/4 cup passionfruit pulp
• 1/4 cup lemon juice
• 1/3 cup lemon curd

For icing

• 100g/3.5ozs. icing or powdered sugar
• Pulp from 1 passionfruit

To make self raising cake flour, replace 2 tablespoons of self raising flour with cornflour/fine cornstarch

Step 1 - Butter the base and sides of a friand tin and line the base with parchment squares. Preheat oven to 160C/320F. Cream the butter and sugar until pale and fluffy (around 3-4 minutes) then add vanilla and eggs, one at a time beating well between each addition. Fold in the flour, passionfruit pulp and lemon juice. Scoop into the friand tins. Bake for 25 minutes or until done.

Step 2 - Cool for 10 minutes then run a butter knife around the edge to loosen the cakes making sure the sides are loosened. Remove from the tins (I place a cooling rack on them and then flip the tin upside down). Cool completely.

Step 3 - Inject the lemon curd into the centre of the cakes. Then sift the icing sugar and mix with enough passionfruit pulp to form and icing that can drip over the cakes. Decorate with edible violets.