Cookies with passion fruit icing

currently, I can’t. You can’t help tripping over vendor’s trays of imported apples, cinnamon is no problem, neither is imported butter or margarine made with imported ingredients, flour milled from imported wheat or sugar — but common or garden, backyard-grown passion fruit? Forget it.

Once upon a long time ago you could buy passion fruit in my local Hi Lo, but not again. Strangely, while they were in season, you couldn’t find a single mango in St Ann’s Hi Lo. Ah well, all the better for our local vegetable and fruit stalls, I suppose — but even they don’t have passion fruit, not while I’m buying essential supplies, anyway.

And what brought all this on? An e-mail from Ian Lambie in Tobago listing the tropical fruits and vegetables that are more nutritious, pack more cancer and heart-disease fighting chemicals than the temperate variety, beginning — wouldn’t you just know it? — with guava, which is scarcer than hen’s teeth in TT.

However perhaps next week we’ll see what else on local farmer’s market and vegetable stalls is better for us than foreign fruits. Meantime, keep searching for passion fruit with which to make these truly delicious, heart-healthy Passion fruit iced Apple cinnamon cookies, or to go strictly local, substitute christophene for apple. Here is the recipe

1 cup flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon powdered cinnamon

40 grams butter (or margarine, if you

think it’s better for you)

1 apple, grated (I use a Granny Smith)

1/3 cup orange juice

1/2 cup oats

2 tablespoons golden syrup

METHOD

Sift the flour with the baking powder and cinnamon into a mixing bowl, cut in the butter or margarine. Stir in the grated apple, orange juice, oats and golden syrup. Drop heaped tablespoons of the mixture on a non-stick oven tray about 5 cms (2 inches) apart.

Bake at 375 degrees Fahrenheit for about 40 minutes of until lightly browned. Cool on a wire rack.

PASSION FRUIT ICING

1 cup icing sugar

1 tablespoon passion fruit pulp (1 large

passion fruit, without the skin but with seeds)

1 teaspoon butter (or margarine if you must)

1 teaspoon non-fat skim milk

METHOD

Sift the icing sugar into a glass (Pyrex or Corning ware) bowl, stir in the passion fruit pulp and seeds and the butter or margarine. Add enough (a very little) milk to make a stiff paste.

Put the bowl over a pan of hot (simmering) water and stir, heat until the paste spreads easily.

Spread the passionfruit icing over the cold cookies.

Makes about 24 cookies.