Passionfruit White Chocolate cupcakes

 First, I'd like to say condolences to the Powell family. The real Julie (from Julie and Julia movie) passed away recently, which got me thinking of blogging again. She was the one who inspired me to blog about food to be honest. I'm planning to sit down with my daughter soon and watch the movie again. 

This is the story of the Passionfruit White Chocolate cupcakes: 

I like a challenge. 

In the beginning, I had ordered a bunch of passionfruits from Imperfect Foods. I tend to just buy things and then figure it out later. But sometimes I dont have time to figure things out and end up with these weird fruits and vegetables that dont really go with anything. 

This one, I happened to be making a pomegranate lemon cupcake and had posted it on Facebook. Seeing that, my friend April had mentioned wanting a good White Chocolate passionfruit cake recipe since I think she found a place that makes them and she wanted me to help. I had ordered some passion fruit so this worked for me! We dug around and found a recipe for me to try and I volunteered to try it. 

I will first tell you, with any recipe, be wary of the amounts of both ingredients and time. 

We start with making the passionfruit curd. In this one, the author says 4 or 5 passionfruits would be 1/2 cup of pulp. I don't know what monstrous passionfruits she got, but mine took 11 to get that much. Fortunately I ended up with 13 from the 2 bags and only 2 were moldy on the inside. 

Here you can see, after you blend the pulp, which is this yellow stringy color with black-green seeds, that you need to strain the seeds out. You can leave em in, and you can eat them, but they are really tart!

Yep exactly 1/2 cup. Yay, I didnt want to have to drive to Ninos to get more. 

You mix this stuff with sugar and cook it over the stove, temper in some blended egg yolks and eggs, then add butter. Be wary, though, they say in the recipe that thickening takes 10-12 mins, and this is not so. It took very little time. Maybe my stove was too hot, but please go by thickness and keep whisking as they tell you. It will create passionfruit scrambled eggs if you're not careful. 

At this point you put it in a bowl, cover with plastic and it has to cool for at least an hour. 

This stuff was TASTY. I love passionfruit. 

Next we make the white chocolate swiss meringue. This is a pain to make, but not nearly as difficult as Italian meringue (think spinning hot sugar and having to have incredible aim). It took 6 egg whites ( so yea buy like 1 1/2 dozen eggs for this entire recipe) and sugar over a double boiler until it lost it's grainyness. I used a thermometer to get to 161F and called it good. 

Once that was done, I added the mix to a stand mixer and whisked it til glossy stiff peaks. Beautiful to look at and tasty. Next we added a LOT of butter. Yea I know, it will deflate, and that's okay. It wasn't too bad if you have not quite room temp butter. 

What I had was 2 sticks of room temp butter and 1 frozen. Sigh. So I added the butter bit by bit, microwaved the frozen stick, and at defrost setting, the top of the stick melted while the bottom was still frozen. I mean, really?

I poured out the melted butter and microwaved the stick again. Eventually I could pry out chunks and softened them to the point manually where they were ok to add. Now I had sort of a creamy mud. And frankly thought I had messed up the recipe. 

I still had to add the white chocolate. 

I melted the white chocolate JUST enough to make it mostly melted then stirred until it was all glossy. Added that to the mix and whipped the meringue and prayed that it would become fluffy again. 

Success!

Look at that fluff! And ooh you can taste the White Chocolate. Yum!

This is my Mise en Place - putting everything in its place before assembly. 

I did not try the cake , but did a cake mix, because honestly most scratch cakes are dense and I wanted fluffy for this one. So I made a golden cake mix for cupcakes. 

Next time I try this I will make that cake from scratch for comparison, as I have curd and meringue leftover. Probably do it today or tomorrow. 

Anyway, here is how I prep the cupcakes. But note, for cake you pipe a wall of meringue between layers and you put the curd in the center. I would make concentric circles so the meringue can hold up the cake its any bgger than a 6 inch cake. Think like a target and you're filling in the target with the curd. 

But for cupcakes, I use an apple corer to pull off the top 2/3 of the center of the cupcake, piped in curd then a dollop of meringue, put the top back on the cupcake, then made a rosette swirl over the entire cupcake.  

I plopped a dollop of curd on top so you know what is in the cupcake.  

Yeah. It looks like an egg yolk, sorry. I meant well. 

But I went with it, and took a glamour shot for Facebook. 

And there we have it. 

At first I was unimpressed with the flavors. I wanted more flavor. But it turns out, I had been tasting curd and meringue, and cake as I went along and well, my palate was not cleansed to really taste the combo. 

The next day I tried another and was much happier with it. 

Please do try this recipe, but give yourself at least 4 hours to do it. Maybe more if making the cake from scratch. 

I promise it's worth the work!

Vicky