A passion that cannot be contained...a passionfruit that shouldn't be tin-canned.

Of course, it would be wrong to end a romantic Valentine's Day meal without a naughty dessert, even if you are eating alone. Keen to think of something tin-based to follow my oysters, I did a search for appropriate puddings, for which there were chocolatey suggestions a-plenty, but one ingredient which kept coming up in recipes was, of course, the passion fruit. Could that be found in tinned form?

Not with any great ease in the UK, it seemed. While John West do produce a tin of passionfruit pulp in syrup, this is only available in Australia, and with the sad demise of the Australia Shop in Covent Garden last year, it looked like it was going to be difficult to find a tin without a fairly hefty price-tag for buying it online. However, Amazon was listing a small tin of granadilla pulp (the South African name for passionfruit), with the following customer review:



"There is no way that this product comes even close to the real Granadilla. It is sour, and horried. I am a true consumer of the fruit, and I even grow my own. I hope that people that have never tasted the fruit would ever think that whatever is in these cans comes close to the real thing. What is canned in these cans is better used for fertilizer for the garden, and should not be consumed by any creature. Man, or beast."

Wow. That's quite a review. I had to try it. Remembering that there is a chain of South African foodshops called The Savanna with branches in several of the major London stations, I called into the Liverpool Street shop on my way home one day in the week and picked up a tin for £1.55. Still a little pricey given the size of the tin, but then it's come a fairly long way I suppose.

As for what recipe to go for, my search had turned up one from Brazil for a passionfruit mousse, which amazingly had an entirely tin-based ingredients list - in addition to the passionfruit, just a can each of sweetened condensed milk and cream, both of which I already had in my stash cupboard. We had ourselves a winner.

But first to the pulp itself. Is it indeed only fit to be used as fertilizer? Of course not. Yet another example of people getting a little carried away with their online reviews, I felt at first. Obviously it isn't going to have the fantastic zing you get with fresh, but it certainly isn't "sour and horried" [sic] - in fact with added sugar it is probably sweeter than most of the fruit I've had in its natural state. There was, however, the slightest hint of a metallic taste to it, which was mentioned by one of the other customer reviews; passionfruit is quite an acidic fruit so an untreated tin is probably not the best way of storing it. Perhaps I was lucky therefore that I was using my tin way ahead of its Best Before date - left to react further with the metal it could well have become unfit to be consumed by man or beast, so maybe the reviewer was on to something after all.

The recipe was simplicity itself - "Put all ingredients in a blender. Blend together well for approximately 3 minutes or until the mixture is well incorporated and thick." As I was using a tin of Carnation Extra Thick Cream, I was a little concerned at first that combined with the gloopy condensed milk, it would prove to be too thick. How wrong I was. As my trusty stick blender got to work on it, the mixture became more and more runny. And then stayed runny. Well beyond the three minutes' blending the recipe suggested, it was still runny.

I took a whisk to it, and beat it furiously for another 5 or more minutes. Still runny, and showing no signs of thickening. I wondered if it might thicken left in the fridge for a bit. Another recipe I had seen, using fresh passionfruit, put the mousse mix into the empty passionfruit halves to serve. Obviously I couldn't do the same, but the empty pulp and cream tins seemed a good size for a dessert portion, so I poured the some of the mixture into these and the remainder into a couple of ramekins, then left them in the fridge for a couple of hours to thicken.

Except they didn't. Several hours later and it was still nothing like mousse consistency. Admittedly the recipe hadn't given any indication as to the size of tins of milk and cream to be used, so I was hedging my bets a bit from the word go, but it's still weird that it went from worryingly thick to ridiculously thin and then wouldn't change. Perhaps I was using the wrong kind of cream, but the label seemed to suggest that whipping it would make it even thicker. Anyway, I decide the only thing for it is to use some of the open packet of gelatin that I've had in my cupboard for ages, to set it a bit with that. So, I tip all the pots into a pan, heat the mixture up, add some softened gelatin leaves and stir well before decanting again and allowing to cool completely.


This time it has indeed set...rather too well. I appear to have added far too much gelatin - we've now gone far beyond mousse consistency. Even if you served these up claiming they were panna cotta or blancmange, you would still get complaints about them being far too dense. Nevertheless, I spoon some of the remaining pulp on top of the now very solid surface of the "mousse" and dig in. "Dig" being the right word here, I think - it's so solid that eating it requires both hands, one to hold the tin in place and the other to gouge out a spoonful. It's pleasant enough in terms of taste, but the intensely sweet flavour of the condensed milk does dominate somewhat, so I am glad I did reserve some of the passionfruit to go on top and cut through that somewhat. But given the consistency, I think it's fair to say that it's been a bit of a disaster really. I do eventually finish my tin, so I wouldn't say that the dessert "should not be consumed by any creature. Man, or beast", but I can't really see myself rushing to have another one. Thankfully, being the end to a romantic meal for one, it is only myself who has to endure it - what could be worse than presenting your loved one with something as overly turgid as this, on Valentines Day of all days? Well, the opposite, I suppose...