I have made no secret of my terrible cookbook habit. When I see a gorgeous cookbook, especially a baking book, resistance is useless, and it must be added to my burgeoning shelves. As I write this, I am contemplating buying The Birthday Cake Book by Fiona Cairns (cake maker to the stars and royalty), which I spied in a Paddington bookshop on my Sydney trip.
Unfortunately, this addiction means that I have not cooked anything out of some of my books. No matter how beautiful, I never seem to get around to it before the next shiny cookbook has my attention, so they sometimes languish unused on the shelf.
A beautiful cookbook that I have owned forever and until recently not used is Donna Hay's Seasons cookbook. Seasons is one of those books that you can just gaze at the pictures, like a fairy story, and be quite satisfied and comforted. However, I finally got around to making not one but two recipes out of it recently. I have coveted forever the Passionfruit Syrup Yoghurt Cake in Seasons, so that was the obvious choice for my first foray into Seasons. As I had a shoulder of pork in the freezer, I also made a cider pork roast out of the book, but I will save that for another post.
Turning to the Passionfruit Syrup Yoghurt Cake, pictured at the top of this post, Lorraine published the recipe on Not Quite Nigella some time ago, and you can find it here. The cake is a moist, fluffy plain sponge, jazzed up by the generous topping of homemade passionfruit syrup:
I did not get anywhere near enough syrup to coat my cake entirely like Donna and Lorraine, but there was still enough to add flavour and moisture to the plain cake beneath. I chose to make my cake in a rose flavoured bundt tin to add to the visual appeal, and I think it looked like an exotic tropical lily, which exuded an elegant passionfruit and vanilla fragrance.
I loved this cake, and would certainly make it again. It was worth the wait, and if you love fruity cake like me, I am sure that you will love it too.
