Cooking with passion(fruit)

Long time blog readers might remember when I first ran into passion fruit in the Bouchon Bakery kitchen.  It is an ingredient I had never thought all that much about but when I tried it in their parfait mixed with caramel and chocolate it made me run out and get some puree to make my own desserts at home (someday I will figure out the right time to harvest the passion fruit in our backyard!).  So I wasn’t too surprised to run across the Chocolate Chip Passion Fruit Layer Cake in the Momofuku Milk Bar cookbook.  It is definitely a flavor mix that sounds strange but somehow the acidic flavor of the passion fruit (almost a grapefruit flavor though without the bitterness) is a perfect match for chocolate and caramel or in the case of this recipe: coffee.

They have an interesting technique for making layer cakes in the cookbook making a small rectangular cake and then cutting circles out of it that I just had to try.  This cake features some of Tosi’s signature crumb (in this case chocolate) that add a simply amazing crunch and flavor to this otherwise soft cake.  I made one slight modification making a caramel butter frosting instead of coffee but otherwise followed the recipe which you can see Christina Tosi herself share the recipes for.  All of the components are pretty amazing by themselves, in fact I might be remaking just chocolate cake for the kids soon.

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