Passion Fruit and Coconut Cake

With whipped milk chocolate ganache

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Hello, happy Friday!

This week's newsletter is short and sweet. I am currently in the studio working on something incredibly exciting, something I can’t officially talk about just yet. Soon, I promise! If you keep an eye on my stories, you might get the odd hint over the next couple of weeks – let’s just say it’ll be worth the wait. I promise!

For this week's recipe, I wanted to make something relatively easy but something that could be served in a slightly elevated fashion, making the simple stylish. My fabulous greengrocer has recently been getting these incredible pink passion fruits that I couldn’t resist. To pair with the passion fruit, I thought I would go with the hits and use one of my favourite flavour combos, passion fruit and milk chocolate, but pair it with some additional coconut. The resulting cake is everything I wanted. Easy to make, comforting and just packed with flavour.

The cake is made with coconut oil, coconut milk and desiccated coconut. I don’t use coconut extract, so the flavour is mild rather than dominant. To make sure the cake has enough coconut flavour, it is important to use the right sort of coconut oil. You can buy two varieties of the oil, refined or virgin. The refined variety is a flavourless oil and adds nothing to this recipe; instead, use the unrefined version, which is sometimes called virgin or extra virgin or even cold pressed. This version of coconut oil has its natural flavour intact.

To add the passion fruit flavour I brush the cake liberally with a passion fruit simple syrup. This makes the outside of the cake sticky, so I like to take advantage of this and roll the cake in desiccated coconut for another layer of flavour and some additional texture. To finish, the cake is sliced and topped with a big scoop of whipped milk chocolate ganache.