Remembering my grandmother through her recipe

Passport & Plate - Shirley Rankins (Passionfruit Yo-yo's)

United Kingdom | Sunday, February 16, 2014 | 5 photos

Ingredients
Biscuits:
175g butter, softened
¾ cup (115g) icing (confectioner's) sugar, sifted
2 teaspoons finely grated lemon rind
1 ¾ cup (265g) plain (all-purpose) flour, sifted
¼ cup (35g) cornflour, sifted
? cup (80ml) passionfruit pulp

Passionfruit Filling:
125g butter, softened
1 cup (150g) icing (confectioner's) sugar, sifted
¼ cup (60ml) passionfruit pulp

 

How to prepare this recipe
Preheat the oven to 160ºC. To make the passionfruit filling, place the butter and icing sugar in the bowl of an electric mixer and beat for about 6 minutes or until pale and creamy. Strain the passionfruit through a sieve to remove the seeds. Add to the butter mixture and beat for a further 3–4 minutes until smooth. Set aside.

To make the biscuits, place the butter, icing sugar and lemon rind in the bowl of an electric mixer and beat for about 6 minutes or until pale and creamy. Add the flour, cornflour and passionfruit pulp and mix until combined. Roll 2 teaspoonfuls of the mixture into balls with damp hands and place on baking trays lined with non-stick baking paper. Press each biscuit with a damp fork to flatten. Bake for 12–15 minutes or until light golden. Allow to cool on trays. Sandwich the biscuits together with the passionfruit filling in the middle to serve.

 

The story behind this recipe
My grandmother baked Yo-yo Biscuits every time we visited. Buttery rounds pinched rather than rolled into shape. She married late, twenty-six. At that age there were already murmurs. Spinster. In those days, she told me, you didn’t meet anyone anywhere other than church. My grandmother lived a small life. The second eldest of ten children, her mother had raised them alone during the Depression. Love is a luxury when necessities are in short supply. After she married they stayed in the same tiny, outback town. She took Asian cookbooks out from the library, collected scraps from magazines. Her hand-written recipe book smudged with oil and dusted with flour. I would have gone to Thailand, she said. All those colours and plants. Her husband was afraid of the world and suspicious of difference. He pushed rice to the side of his plate and said, why can’t you cook anything normal? She started to lose track of things. We drove up to see her and she made me chocolate chip cookies instead. Shame and confusion pinched the skin around her eyes as she gave them to me. I thought, how could you forget? My child’s heart grappling a selfish hurt and the knowledge of something bigger and sadder than I could understand. I was ten, so I sulked, and she sensed it. Her heart breaking for the inability to make me understand the fear of what her own mind was doing to her. At dinner, she burned the chops and my mother asked her, why did you leave them on for so long? I forgot how to take them off, she replied. Within a year she was in a nursing home. She never baked again. I hold that in my heart like a stone. Her last gift to me came in the guise of something lesser. I made her feel it was lesser. Now I buy Yo-yo’s all the time, their softness leaving grease stains on paper bags. Buttery discs that carry a memory and a regret. But for all their perfect forms and whisked-smooth dough, they never taste the same as hers. A sweet echo of a time passed and a person loved.