A Slab of Summer: Almond, Lemon and Passionfruit Drizzle Cake

🎓 Post-PhD • 📘 History • 😑 Unenthused

I will start by being honest: this is, in the main, not my recipe. It was taken from one of Nigella Lawson’s wonderful anthologies*. As I took one or two liberties with her creation, I feel I can still write about and heavily recommend it, but I would be downright plagiarising if I didn’t make it clear that almost all the praise belongs to her.

Another thing I should be honest about is that, although this may be a recipe that can be made sort-of last minute (there is some baking time and you might want to let it get a tad cool before serving/transporting), it does require you to have ripe passionfruit. In other words, unless you have a passionfruit dealer that can supply you with optimal fruits, you’ll need to buy them in advance. In my case, I bought them four days ahead. And if you have no idea what a ripe passionfruit looks like then, simply: a smooth passionfruit is no good to you, you want an at least partly (but ideally, thoroughly) wrinkled specimen. That may seem counter-intuitive but there you go.

All those caveats aside, let me set the scene: it’s a Wednesday and I suddenly remember that I’m meant to be visiting an old aunt on Sunday. Ok, so she’s not actually my aunt but one of my late grandma’s best friends. Also, she’s a lauded Professor in my research field, so a big f****** deal. Believe it or not, this is a complete coincidence; I only learnt about her after I started going down my research route.

She’s a lovely person, with interesting things to say and well-acquainted with what’s going on in the world, unlike perhaps your non-academic OAP equivalent. That said, she’s German, in her mid-80s, without a partner or children and firmly committed to her profession (or was, at least, she’s retired now). She’s very good to me, yet I often come away feeling a bit crap after seeing her. She’s the sort of German that makes light of the reality of your situation in a way to diffuse the seriousness of it. Perhaps this is a way of showing affection, I don’t know, but it clashes with my english sensibilities (read: over-sensitivity to criticism). Once, for instance, I was told I wasn’t academic material because I had written my thesis too slowly. She also said this had been the same for her, but it obviously hadn’t actually been because she had done her thesis part-time and had subsequently enjoyed an overwhelmingly successful career.

So, I wasn’t buzzing for the visit and, as is our tradition, needed to think about what I could bake/bring cake-wise for the occasion. I knew I’d have very little enthusiasm in the morning and it would be a Sunday, a day on which I like to do very little. So, I thought, sod it, I’ll make a sponge that I can throw together but will intensify the fruitiness given her usual request for lighter baked goods. Maybe that level of creativity would protect my feelings of self-worth for the day.

I landed on this Nigella concoction but instead of using elderflower (as in her recipe), I dampened a little of the sweetness and amped up the summery notes with passionfruit. I must say, it worked extremely well and tasted like a stodgy iteration of a pornstar martini (that said, a glass of fizz would go fabulously). Be warned: this cake will only ever have a face for radio, but more than makes up for it in flavour. 

A few notes on the recipe: 

I used three extra large passionfruits for this. If your passionfruits are on the smaller side, perhaps use four or five. There are no strict rules for how much passionfruit juice you should use; the main thing is that there is enough to properly douse the cake so that it’s sumptuously moist. I’d say ascertaining about 5-7 tbsp in total would be ideal.

Despite what the photo shows, I would advise using a loaf tin. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to source one in Berlin. If you do indeed use a loaf tin then I would maybe check on the cake a little more often and not be tempted to turn up the oven temperature (in fact, feel free to lower it slightly) so it bakes evenly.

*Lawson, Nigella, Cook, Eat, Repeat: Ingredients, Recipes and Stories (London: Chatto & Windus, 2020), pp. 75-77.

Servings: 6-8           🥕 V

Time:
👐 Hands-on: 15 minutes
⏳ Hands-off: 25 minutes

Ingredients

• 175g soft unsalted butter

• 150g caster sugar

• 100g plain flour

• 75g ground almonds

• Pinch of fine sea salt

• 1 tsp baking powder 

• 3 large eggs

• 1 large lemon, zested

• 3 extra large passionfruits (or 4-5 smaller passionfruits, see intro)

• Icing sugar (this really depends on the amount of passionfruit juice you end up with, but have at least 3-4 generous tbsp at the ready)

Instructions

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C (160°C fan), line your chosen baking tin with enough baking parchment so it hangs over the sides (it’ll make lifting the cake out easier). 

2. Spoon the contents of your passionfruits into a tea strainer or other fine mesh sieve, push through all the juice with a spoon so that only the seeds remain (which you can discard).

3. In a bowl, cream together the butter, sugar, lemon zest and 2 tbsp of the passionfruit juice until pale and smooth.

4. In another bowl, mix the flour, ground almonds, salt and baking powder together.

5. Beat one egg into the wet mixture and then a third of the mixed dry ingredients. Continue like this with the remaining two eggs and dry ingredients until everything has been mixed together.

6. Scrape the mixture into the baking tin and bake for 20-25 minutes, until golden brown and a cake tester (feel free to use a chopstick, piece of dried spaghetti, skewer or tooth pick) comes out clean.

7. Once the cake is out of the oven and still warm, spoon 2 heaped tbsp of icing sugar through a tea strainer/fine mesh sieve to remove any lumps. Now add 3 tbsp of passionfruit juice and whisk until the sugar has dissolved. Keep adding icing sugar and passionfruit juice until all the juice has been used and you have a drizzle with a thin, pourable consistency. 

8. Puncture holes all over the cake using any of the implements I suggested in instruction no. 6. Now gently spoon the drizzle all over the cake until it has absorbed.

9. I’d advise giving the cake 10 minutes or so to settle and properly absorb the juice, but it’s totally up to you.

Storage

Will keep for up to a week if wrapped, but best to eat sooner.