Passionfruit lamingtons

I have made over the humble lamington in this simple recipe.  Once more, I am publishing ‘small food’ and for that you inevitably want maximum flavour.  In my opinion, sponge cake doesn’t quite cut it so I have made a light blondie-brownie as the base.  The catering company I worked for gave me the idea for using brownie; when you are making 10,000 petit fours for the week you really want to be out-sourcing the brownie, but for a small batch such as this, it’s really simple to bake.

Traditionally lamingtons would be served with cream but I think these are perfect on their own.

Ingredients

• Blondie brownie
• 1 cup white chocolate buttons
• 1 cup brown sugar
• ½ cup butter
• 2 eggs
• 1 ½ cups flour
• 1 ½ tsp baking powder
• ½ tsp salt

• Passionfruit syrup
• 230g passionfruit syrup
• 1 cup boiling water
• 10g powdered gelatine

• Coating
• Dessicated coconut (I like to mix in coconut thread)

Method

• --
• 1. Preheat the oven to 170ºC on Bake.
• 2. Put the white chocolate in the freezer for 15 mins; you want to chill the chocolate to prevent it from melting it in the blender when processing.
• 3. Line a baking tin with baking paper.
• 4. Cream the brown sugar and the butter.
• 5. Beat in the eggs.
• 6. Blend the chocolate in a food processor. Ideally you want the chocolate as fine as possible but it’s ok to have larger bits (the size of rice grains).
• 7. Sieve in the flour, baking powder and salt into the sugar/butter/egg mixture. Add the blended chocolate and mix all ingredients until just combined.
• 8. Pour the mixture into the lined pan and cook for 25 mins or until cooked through (use a toothpick or skewer to check) and golden.
• 9. Cool the brownie on a wire rack.
• 10. Boil 1 cup of water and in it, dissolve the gelatine.
• 11. Add the passionfruit pulp, mix and leave to cool to room temperature.
• 12. Cut the brownie into squares (approximately 2cm x 2cm), dip into the cool passionfruit mixture and then into a bowl with coconut.

• Tips and tricks
• The passionfruit mixture will start to solidify as it cools. Thin it down by microwaving it for 20 seconds or so.