Starfruit Upside Down Cake

My boyfriend's favorite fruit is starfruit. I had never really had one until we started dating. They are actually pretty mild-tasting, like a combination of a pear, a grape, and an apple with the consistency of an orange. Hard to explain.. but good! His birthday was yesterday and I surprised him with this upside cake I found after a long google session.

The ingredients called for passionfruits, and being in New Hampshire it's pretty obvious that this is something I don't see every day. I found them at Hannaford luckily. I had no idea what I was doing when I juiced these bad boys but I did the best I could. What a WEIRD texture!

I scooped out the insides of the passionfruits with a spoon and juiced them by hand. I used the edge of the peeler to get the seeds out of the star shapes (I did miss a few though!)

Star Fruit Upside Down Cake (from http://www.nikibone.com/recipe/fruit/starfruit.html)

3 to 4 star fruit, sliced

1/4 cup butter, melted
2/3 cup dark brown sugar
juice of 2 passion fruit

1/2 cup butter, softened
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 1/2 cups cake flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
pinch of salt
1/2 cup milk
1 teaspoon each of vanilla and almond extract

Preheat oven to 350F. Arrange sliced star fruit in bottom of a greased 9 inch cake pan as close together as possible. Mix together 1/4 cup butter, brown sugar and passion fruit juice and pour into pan, turning so mixture covers bottom. Set aside.

Cream together 1/2 cup of butter and sugar. Add eggs, one at a time, beat well. Mix together dry ingredients. Add flour mixture, alternately with milk, to butter mixture. Stir in vanilla and almond extracts. Pour into prepared cake pan. Bake for approximately 30 minutes or until cake pulls away form sides of pan. Let cool for five minutes before inverting onto serving plate.

8 servings

It was not what I expected.. it turned out to be a really dense cake, but it was so, so good! We had it with scoops of rainbow sherbet :) Mmmm

Zucchini Bread

I picked up a monster of a zucchini from a farmer's cart the other day outside of my work. It sat in my fridge for days, during which it was constantly coming up in my thoughts. It's been sort of like this.

Zucchini: "Why haven't you eaten me yet??"

Me: "I'm too busy!!"

Zucchini: "I'm going to go bad soon, and you're going to be wasteful!"

Me: "Aaaaaagh!!"

I hate wasting food, and I think I hate eating bad-for-you foods even more. But I had to get this Zucchini out of my fridge so I pulled up an old recipe card of my grandmother's. This is not the same grandmother who loved to cook, this one is still alive and kicking in a nursing home out in MI. I don't have too many of her recipes, and this was a new one for me. It was actually really good. Probably because of the two cups of sugar that went into it :) I didn't do the two loaves, I did three of the mini loaves and a bunch of mini muffins. I'm not sure that the batter really is enough for two loaves, but I'll update next time I try it.

Anyways.. I'll post now!



Grandma Dz's Zucchini Bread

Ingredients:

3 eggs
2 cups sugar
1 cup oil
2 cups grated zucchini
½ tsp vanilla
3 cups flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
1 tbsp cinnamon
½ cup nuts
½ cup raisins (I subbed for chocolate chips)

Preheat oven to 325 degrees.

Combine sugar, zucchini, flour, baking soda, salt, baking powder and cinnamon in large mixing bowl. Add eggs, oil and vanilla, blending all ingredients together. Stir in nuts and raisins/choc chips. Pour batter into two 9x5x2 loaf pans and bake for about an hour.

Yields: 2 loaves

Almond Joy Cookies

This one's an absolute treasure. I mean it - I cannot believe something so easy can taste so good. I found this recipe on an index card written out by my grandmother (the one who just passed away in May) and I thought I'd try it out. There wasn't much description on it; there was no ingredient list, just a few scribbles of instruction. So here goes..

Almond Joy Cookies

1 can Eagle Brand sweetened condensed milk
2 oz bittersweet chocolate (I used Ghiradelli chocolate chips)
3 cups sweetened shredded coconut
1 tsp vanilla
Handful of almonds

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Heat milk and chocolate on top of double boiler. Cook and let bubble for several minutes.

In a mixing bowl, measure out the three cups of coconut. Add vanilla. Once chocolate-milk mixture has heated through, pour on top of coconut-vanilla mixture and stir to combine thoroughly.

Use a small cookie scoop to drop on a well-greased cookie sheet. Press an almond into each cookie. Bake for about 8 minutes.

Allow these cookies to cool before removing. They are extremelyyyy sticky so I actually had to peel them off of the parchment paper. If the cookie got misshapen, it was easily fixed by just re-molding it back into shape. Keep these in the refrigerator -- if they are not cold, they will fall apart when they are picked up!

YUM!