I couldn’t resist the lure of a second tropical fruit named after a dessert, so I purchased some lemon meringue pie fruits from Miami Fruit. LMPFs are also known as rollinias, biribas (in Brazil), or, unfortunately, snotfruits, and they’re said to taste like either lemon meringue pie or peach cobbler.
I would occasionally get a hint of lemon but found them to be rather light in flavor overall. The texture of most of them was on the slimy side but nowhere near as slimy as to warrant the name snotfruit. They contained a lot of seeds, which I separated out from the flesh in my mouth and spit out.
The fruits varied in size and shape. They got blacker as they sat. I put some in the fridge once I was pretty sure they were ripe so we didn’t have to eat them all in, like, three days. I ate most of them when they were noticeably mushy to the touch. Maybe they only needed to not be rock hard.
Official taste tester Tony, my husband, got some lemon flavor from the first one he tried, but as the days progressed, he got less of it. I gave one to my friend Charlie, who didn’t find it to be all that amazing, but my coupled friends Bill and Chris really enjoyed theirs. Bill definitely got lemon meringue pie, which is his favorite dessert, and it reminded Chris of guanabana. (And this Specialty Produce webpage tells me it’s in the same family as guanabana.)
Bill is trying to germinate the seeds, so there may be more LMPFs in their future—and possibly mine.
I’m so old-school, or maybe just plain old, I have two accordion folders of recipes I’ve clipped out of magazines over the years: mostly from Martha Stewart Living, Bon Appétit, and Food & Wine, with lesser numbers from Gluten Free & More (and its sad-trombone-sounding previous incarnation Living Without 1 ) and Gourmet. While winnowing out some recipes I decided I’ll almost certainly never make, I came across a winning recipe from the May 2015 issue of Bon Appétit called Carrot-Walnut Loaf Cake in the Breakfast Treats section.
The recipe was in a section of the magazine called r.s.v.p. that allowed readers to ask for a recipe from a restaurant or food shop. In this case, a reader from Brooklyn requested the recipe from New York's Breads Bakery. Breads is still in business and still making this carrot cake, though apparently now with currants—a small type of raisin that's dark in color and also called a Zante currant—instead of golden raisins.
Because the recipe called for beating a lot of air into the eggs and sugar, I figured I had to use actual chicken eggs instead of vegan eggs for this recipe. Aquafaba eggs might have worked well, but Tony can't eat chickpeas, so the liquid from canned chickpeas is also a no-no.
The recipe is pretty much perfect, but the second time I made the cake, I used slightly heaping half cups of raisins and walnuts, so I'd have a little more of those flavor and texture enhancers throughout the loaf. I also slightly heaped the tablespoon of flour the nuts and raisins are coated in to make sure they don't all sink to the bottom of the pan.
The recipe is available at Epicurious, with no credit given to Breads.
1 I can actually understand why the publication was called that during its earlier years: There just weren't a lot of great options for people who needed to avoid gluten and other harmful subtances back then, so the focus was on finding ways to live without the bad things.