Decadently sublime recipe for coconut and butter cake with passionfruit icing

 If you love butter cakes like I do then you'll love this cake. It is wickedly creamy and the passionfruit icing is *SO* good! I've adapted a Karen Martini recipe. Of the few recipes that I've tried from Martini, every single one of them has been spot on and because of that, I'm sure that she's tested them.

It's so simple to make as well so if you love butter cakes and you love passionfruit then you have to try this. Unfortunately I had the cravings for this passionfruit butter cake when each passionfruit is $1.30 each! Doh...

Ingredients:

125ml milk

80g plain yoghurt

1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract

250g plain flour

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp bicarbonate soda

1/4 tsp salt

120g dessicated coconut

130g unsalted butter

200g caster sugar

3 large eggs

Passionfruit icing:

150g unsalted butter, softened

350g pure icing sugar, sifted

5 passionfruit, strain the juice from the pulp to separate into two bowls

Steps for cake:

1. Preheat oven to 180C fan forced (200C conventional). Grease and line a 25cm round cake tin
2. In a bowl, combine milk, yoghurt and vanilla.
3. In a separate bowl, sift flour, baking powder, bicarbonate soda and salt together then add coconut
4. Using an electric mixer with a whisk attachment, beat butter and caster sugar together until pale and fluffy. Add eggs one at a time. Then in alternating small batches, add milk mixture and flour mixture, blending well after each addition
5. Pour batter into tin and bake for 35-40 mins until a skewer inserted into the middle of the cake comes out clean. 
6. Allow cake to cool in the tin on a wire rack for 20 minutes

Steps for icing:

1. Beat butter with whisk attachment in an electric mixer, add icing sugar and beat to combine, add the passionfruit juice and mix thoroughly
2. Cut the cooled cake in half and spread some of the icing in the center and icing on the top
3. Garnish the top icing with the passionfruit pulp

Autumn gardening

We planted some carnation seeds back in Spring last year and have been reaping flowers for the past two months. The carnation plants just keeps blooming every single week : ) Ideally you should cut the blooms from the plant so that they keep flowering. Check to see if there are any new shoots on the stems and cut the bloom just above the new shoots so that the plant can keep growing and blooming.

My favourite colour out of my limited range would be the egg yolk coloured carnation with the pink edging. Although I do love the white one as well with the streaks of vivid red. Then the light pink and the deep pink. If you love gardening and plants, then Autumn and Winter is a great time for planting bulbs so that they can bloom for Spring.

I have gorgeous irises and daffodil bulbs which I've got to plant soon. See how beautiful the carnations are in my clear vase: