Passion Fruit Melting Moments by Dan Lepard

Another recipe from Dan Lepard's Book Short and Sweet.  I bought this book when I was caught up in the Great British Bake Off frenzy towards the end of 2012.  I had got through the first 'sieve'..Hah, hah, and was baking my way to putting on the extra stone in weight, which I have worked on to loose, and am nearly done!  Anyway, I was eliminated after the first screen test, and have not looked back since.  I still enjoy the series, looking forward to the new one, but am mightily relieved that I was not sucked in any further!

The recipe is available on line at the Guardian, so do go here if you would like to try it.  On this occasion I made up half of the recipe giving 12 paired biscuits, but decided not to sandwich them up in advance, but just as the biscuits are going to be served.   I'm not able to judge if they will go soggy.
This time I sieved out the seeds, next time I shall try some of the icing with the seeds in.  I also used my mildly salted Delamere Goat's Butter, rather than the unsalted butter given in the recipe and was perfectly happy with the substitution.

I have only just recently taken this book down off the bookshelf, and had been reading small sections and enjoying Dan's writing.  I feel he is writing to inspire you and to get you to use your own judgement.  I certainly had to do this when I made up the icing.  Another point is that he writes: 'bake until crisp and lightly coloured'.  I would say be guided by the time and colour, as they crisp up as the cool.  When they come out of the oven, leave them to cool on the tray for a little while, say 2 to 3 minutes, then carefully transfer to a cooling rack.  If they need a little longer, they can go back in the oven.

Last Saturday we went down to Warwick for a saunter around, and as usual a nose through the market, where there are some good weekly produce stalls.  I do use the Kenilworth Market, but as I tell them, I wish they came at least twice a week, if not three times!  I often pick up some items from the Jans' Fruit & Vegetable stall, and for some reason or other was given two freebies: a nice stout cotton bag and a couple of passion fruit.  These were the big yellow ones, just like the ones Mum used to grow in Mauritius.  Usually in England we get smaller purple fruit,.  Mr S reminded me of the daily task Mum used to get us to do, which was to hand pollinate all the flowers of her passion fruit plants.  The fence was also interwoven with stephanotis, which ended up in many bride's wedding bouquets.       One evening as we pollinated the flowers, one each side of the thirty metre section of chain link fence, we counted over 350 blooms...all the fruit which must have numbered more than a thousand  was gathered and distributed, but we were gone by that time.  The 'Mauritian' Bees are not able to pollinate the passsion fruit.

Luckily for the icing, I started with the icing sugar and then added the juice and cream teaspoon by teaspoon, or I would have ended up with a bowl of very liquid icing, then I would have had to add more icing sugar, resulting in a bit pot of delicious icing, and would have had to bake something else to use it all up!

I sandwiched up five pairs for our Friday tea time treat.

With a large pot of Earl Grey tea, these biscuits are really elegant and delicious morsels, well worth curling the little pingy for!  For a mixed tea I think I would make the biscuits even smaller, and leave a few of the seeds in the icing.