Passion Fruit Cheesecake Rings
It sat on the Farang menu for years and quietly outworked almost everything around it. It's fed a wedding under the arches, carried more dinner parties than I can count, and it's still the pudding I build when I want to look like I've gone to real trouble without breaking a sweat on the night. The graft is all up front. You juice, you strain, you whip, you set, and once these little rings are together they hold, sharp passion fruit sitting against cool set cream on a coconut base with a wobble of jelly on top. Get it right and it looks like something you shouldn't be allowed near before dinner.
Passion Fruit Cheesecake Rings
Makes: 10 | Prep: 45 mins | Chill: overnight
Ingredients
For the coconut base:
320g digestive biscuits
50g unsalted butter (melted)
40g desiccated coconut
40g caster sugar
Pinch of salt
For the filling:
100g passion fruit pulp (from roughly 5 to 6 fruit, juiced and strained)
400ml double cream (cold, straight from the fridge)
720g full fat cream cheese
100g sour cream
200g icing sugar
Zest of 2 lemons
Zest of 2 limes
For the passion fruit jelly:
2 gelatine sheets
2 passion fruits
100ml water
To finish:
A few kumquats (thinly sliced)
Extra lemon and lime zest
Method
Blitz the digestives, melted butter, coconut, caster sugar and a pinch of salt in a food processor until it looks like wet sand and clumps when you press it between your fingers. Press 50g firmly into each ring mould sat on a lined tray, packing it down hard with the back of a spoon. A loose base collapses the second a spoon goes near it, and after all that work you want a clean line through every layer. Chill until firm.
Scoop the pulp of 5 to 6 passion fruit and warm it gently with 20ml water, just enough to loosen it, then push it through a sieve to lose the seeds. Cool it completely before it goes anywhere near the cream. Warm passion fruit will slacken the mix and you'll never get it to set properly.
Whip the double cream to firm peaks. Stop the moment it holds its shape. Push it past that and it turns grainy and buttery and there is no bringing it back.
Fold the cream cheese, sour cream, icing sugar, cooled passion fruit and the lemon and lime zest through the cream until smooth and holding. Taste it now. It should be sharp against the sweetness with the citrus lifting the whole thing. If it tastes flat or too sweet, work in a little more passion fruit or a squeeze of lime until it bites back.
Load it into a piping bag and pipe roughly 150g on top of each set base. Tap the tray down on the bench a few times to knock out any air pockets, then chill until fully set, a few hours or overnight.
Soak the gelatine in cold water for 20 minutes until floppy. Warm the 100ml water in a small pan with the pulp of 2 passion fruits, lift it off the heat and stir the softened gelatine through until it dissolves completely, then strain out the seeds. Leave it at room temperature for about 10 minutes to cool and thicken. Pour it over too hot and it slides straight off the cream, leave it too long and it sets in the pan. You want it loose but syrupy, thick enough to sit.
Lay the sliced kumquats over each chilled cheesecake and spoon around 30ml of jelly over the top of each one. Leave them to set. Push them out of the rings just before serving and scatter over a little more lemon and lime zest.
A well made one holds a clean edge when you cut in, the jelly gives slightly under the spoon, and the first thing you get is the sharpness before the cream comes in behind it. Push the passion fruit harder if you like it sourer, or set the jelly a touch firmer if you want it to hold a taller shape.
Chef's notes
Buy your passion fruit ahead and let it wrinkle. Smooth and shiny means sharp and mean, crinkled and heavy in the hand means it's ready to give you everything. A tight, hard skin is a fruit that isn't done.
These will happily sit in the fridge for a couple of days before the jelly goes on, which is the whole point of them. Feeding a crowd, build the bases and the filling the day before and only deal with the jelly on the day itself. It takes the panic out of a dinner party completely. If you want another pudding that does the hard graft in advance, my Spiced Mango Jam Cake runs on the same idea, big tropical fruit flavour, all built ahead, ready when you are.
If you can't get leaf gelatine, powdered works, use around 5g and bloom it in the cold water first, but leaf gives a cleaner, glassier set on top so it's worth hunting down.
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For more recipes, signed copies of my cookbooks are available at Payst: Cook Thai and Thai in 7.
Head chef & founder of Farang London restaurant. Cookbook author of ‘Cook Thai’ & ‘Thai in 7’. Chief curry paste basher and co-founder of Payst London.