Chocolate cake with coffee icing.
It’s the cake I would make for mum each and every birthday when I was a teenager. The chocolate cake recipe was an ever reliable one from a Women’s Weekly Cookbook and the instant coffee icing would more often than not be dotted with a few stale old walnut halves to decorate. For years I never strayed from that recipe, (dry old thing it was.)
One year it was extra special, I forgot the eggs (or I think that’s what happened.) I gently tipped the cake out and splat. The whole thing landed on the cake rack in a thousand chocolatey bread crumbs. No one else was home, it was supposed to be a surprise. What on earth was I going to do?
In tears I tried to salvage the crumbs and somehow press them into a cake shape, (you see cake pops hadn’t been invented yet.) I pressed and pressed and then covered the whole thing with a thick coffee icing, trying to ignore the big wet salty tears that still occasionally landed on top. Mum got home and I offered up the lumpy shaped dome with the tear smudged icing…Happy Birthday Mum, I whispered with a slightly quivered bottom lip.
A crumbly chocolate cake with coffee icing this isn’t. If my mum wasn’t currently kicking up her heals at the moment in Europe I think I would have made this Passionfruit Cake for her instead. There is nothing fancy about it, just a simple cake that’s moist, not crazy sweet, really easy to make and not remotely like that dry old chocolate cake I used to make.
Passionfruit Cake
150g softened butter
150g caster sugar
3 beaten eggs
pulp of five passionfruit
225g self raising flour
Cream butter and sugar together until pale, then add eggs. Next add passionfruit pulp and flour. Bake in a greased and lined spring form tin at 180C for approximately 40 minutes.
Passionfruit Icing
25g softened butter
icing sugar
pulp from 1 passionfruit
juice from 1/2 a lemon
cityhippyfarmgirl 
OMG that looks amazing! I’m having a challenging day and could so go a piece of cake right now – thanks for the virtual cheer up!
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Consider a big hunk of it sent your way dear Keri. And I hope the rest of your day sorts itself out. x
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I can imagine the tartness of this cake!
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Not crazy tarty Tandy, but passionfruity yes indeed 🙂
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I.adore.passionfruit.cake. And I haven’t had any for three and a half thousand years! Soon to be rectified. 🙂 Thank you.
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Three and a half thousand years Rose? Oh goodness dear lady, get baking. That’s far too long!
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Love passion fruit and I could gobble this up by myself.
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Passionfruit is delicious isn’t it…possibly too delicious.
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so simple and gorgeous – I think my mum would really love this cake – she has a soft spot for passionfruit – and I am sure your own mum loved that you baked her birthday cakes even if you were still on a painful learning curve
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Super simple Johanna. Fluffing about with a cake all day doesn’t hold much appeal at the moment. But I still like to eat it 🙂
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Ooh I love passionfruit…. and cake of course! If the repairman fixes my oven tomorrow I’m so making that cake.
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How long has it been down for Barbara? My oven down would a pain indeed. Hope it gets fixed for you.
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It’s still usable, just cant operate the fan. Without it the oven takes about an hour to pre heat and is very uneven, so definitely no cake baking happening.
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I’m new to passionfruit, but my niece recently sent me some cans of passionfruit syrup and I had some left over from the Pavlova I made- so I used it in a barbeque sauce I cooked up for some ribs. It was fantastic- I love the tangy tartness/sweetness and the crunchy seeds. Now I wish I had made a cake- maybe she will send me some more and I will try it! Thanks, Brydie- your recipes are always so simple and yet so elegant and flavorful!
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Those canned passionfruit syrup are ok Heidi, but the real deal is different again. There is a tangy tartiness that I can’t really compare to any other fruit. I wish I could send you some!
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your cake looks so beautiful brydie..i adore passionfruit so much that it was one of the first things i planted in my garden..it grew beautifully covering a low growing fence in two years..just when it started producing i discovered it had woody passionfruit disease so i had to pull the whole thing out..as you can imagine i was very sad..x
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Oh that would have been very disappointing Jane…did you replant any?
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I used to make cakes from the Women’s Weekly Cookbook all the time! They were a great way to learn to cook. I love the look of your passionfruit cake and good to see you remembered the eggs xx
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I think my first 10 years of cooking was solidly out of the Women’s Weekly Cookbooks. Flicking back through the pages and there is oodles of cooking memories between the slopped on pages. The chocolate cake recipe in particular I think had a cup of milk in it. Funny how recipes and taste buds change, you’d be hard pressed to find one with that amount of milk in there now (or at all.)
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Yummo! Cakes with lemon and passionfruit are my favs. Your recipe sounds perfect Brydie. Loved the story about the chocolate ‘crumb’ cake. I bet your mother loved you even more for it. If that’s even possible. If I wasn’t alone I whip it up. But then; I’d eat the whole thing and that’d be bad – yeah?
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No, not all Mariana. You see if you made one just for you, you’d have breakfast (European style), lunch, and dinner sorted. It just makes sense. Meal planning with the whole day in mind. Right?
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Gotcha. Now all I have to do is wait till dark; put on some black gear; crawl along the ground to the neighbour’s fence where the passionfruit grow; then quietly relieve the vine of five passionfruit – Or – I could just go and ask them. x
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I’m sure your Mum loved that cake fully and entirely…but am also sure she’d love this one just a teeny bit more 😉 Beautiful!
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I *adore* passion fruit. Yum!!
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