Two-Step Passionfruit Slice

Who doesn’t love passionfruit? Sweet, tarty – the idea of a little surprise when you cut it open. It is the Kinder Surprise of the natural world. And, you can use either fresh or tinned passionfruit pulp for this two-step passionfruit slice.

(A quick aside: passionfruit is correct as either one word or two, depending where you come from. I like that at one word, it’s its own entity.)

Now, here’s a confession. I’m scarred by all the times I’ve made biscuits/cookies that ended up like pizza. However, slices in baking trays, sign me up! My mother-in-law had a raft of slice recipes that she whipped out regularly for those multitude of occasions when you needed to “bring something along”. (She also had a bunch of slab biscuit/cookie recipes, but that’s for another day.)

The beautiful, exotic passionfruit comes from South America, possibly the rainforests of Brazil. The name “passion fruit” came from Spanish missionaries, who considered the flower symbolic of the Passion of Christ (the events leading up to the crucifixion), naming it the flower of the five wounds, flor dos cinco chagas. The original Portuguese/Spanish name was maracujá/maracuyá, meaning fruit that serves itself, or fruit in a bowl. Which is serendipitous, as this passionfruit slice is (kind of) made “in a bowl”, too.

My mother grew passionfruit. In my childhood home, the vine stretched across the entire verandah. In another home, it weaved itself on the garage. She was such a great gardener. Whenever I smell passionfruit, I think of her vines, the flowers, and summer, and eating fruit after delicious fruit.

“What’s inside seems almost not meant to be seen: a geometrical, otherworldly cluster of small black seeds (edible, delicate, and pleasingly crunchy), each suspended in an orb of glossy, sunset-colored pulp, surrounded by fragrant juice of the same golden hue, as obscenely slurpable as an oyster.”

-Hannah Goldfield “A Passion-Fruit Devotee’s Pilgrimage West”, The New Yorker, Jan 8, 2024