The 3rd Annual Utah Pawpaw Festival

On Friday night, September 22, we held the 3rd Annual Utah Pawpaw Festival. (If you're looking for accounts of the 2nd Annual Utah Pawpaw Festival or the 1st Annual Utah Pawpaw Festival, click here and here.)

We decided the harvest has been big enough this year that we could introduce the pawpaw revelers to a pawpaw cake. So on Thursday night, I took a knife and spoon to a few pawpaws and filled this bowl with pawpaw pulp. 

Here are the pawpaw skins from the fruits I used for the pulp. It looks like it took about four or five pawpaws to make that bowl of pulp. The skins on the left are the ones I've spooned the pulp out of. The skins on the right--those are the ones that NJ got to after I spooned the pulp out of them. NJ eats closer to the rind (watermelon, pawpaws, etc) than I do. 

These are the pawpaws that we had left over after I made the pulp. Just 12 of them, which worried us a bit, since according to the Evite that NJ sent out, there would be 67 people attending the 3rd Annual Utah Pawpaw Festival.

We comforted ourselves by thinking that we also had these four pawpaws (in the foreground) in reserve--they were about to be ripe and might be right by Friday night. As for the pawpaw in the background--that one fell from the tree a little early and we were sure it wouldn't be ripe in time for the festival, so I committed to give it to a guy who goes to a nearby university and had contacted me about trying a pawpaw. (I met him on campus on the day of the festival and made the hand-off, instructing him not to eat it until it turned fragrant and pretty soft.) We also consoled ourselves by saying that everyone didn't need to have a whole pawpaw or even a half of a pawpaw but could have a quarter of a pawpaw or even an eighth of some of the big pawpaws.

After thus consoling ourselves, I started to work on making the pawpaw cakes. (And NJ started to work on being my life coach while I made the cakes.) Here's the recipe. And sorry the pic isn't oriented well. I've spent too much time trying to get it right-side-up but some type of little ghost in the machine is foiling my efforts and I need to move on. If you want to see a pic of it right-side-up, take a look at when I made a pawpaw cake in October 2016.

Here's NJ cleaning up after me--I told you she eats closer to the rind than I do and she likes to get more of the batter off the spoon than I do. So she's getting the last of the batter, which I missed, off of the spoon and into the pan. And she's doing it with such good cheer.

With the last two drops of batter in the pan, I was ready to put the cakes into the oven to bake.

While we waited for the cakes to finish baking, I snooped around in the fridge wondering if we had happened to have lost any stray pawpaws in there that we could find and use for the festival the next evening. Turns out we had indeed lost one, huddled between the pickles and the margarine. (I know some of you are sneering right now that we've got margarine rather than "real butter" in our fridge, and that's fine. Just know that I'm too generous to sneer at you when I consider the fact that most of you eat many more apples and oranges than you do pawpaws.)

Once the cakes were finished baking it was time to put on the cream cheese frosting (recipe also visible in the photo above).

These are the baked goods we had ready by 6:30 pm on Friday night, a half-hour before the revelers started arriving for the festival: I had made the two pawpaw cakes on the right, and NJ had made the apple-cardamom cakes in the middle as well as the brownies on the left..

And the festival began! There were some repeat offenders at the festival that you may recognize from previous pawpaw festivals. And then there were some new people on the guest list, including friends from the neighborhood and work, and also people who we've met via this blog solely because we share a common interest in the pawpaw.

Fortunately the revelers brought other items to fill up the plates besides just pawpaws. (More fortunate still would be if we had enough pawpaws to fill up the plates!)

In the left corner: a reveler who drove all the way from Ogden to Provo to join in the festivities. Also in this pic is a reveler who garnered an invitation by virtue of the fact that a few months ago he saw the pawpaw trees as he walked by our house and later when he bumped into me said, "Hey you've got pawpaw trees don't you?" We were so impressed that he could identify them that we immediately placed his name on the list of invitees. 

And then it turned out that the guy who goes to the local university also made it to the pawpaw festival.

In the end, we did have enough pawpaws to give some people a pawpaw half. (I took people out to look at the trees before it got dark and was able to harvest a few extras.) It also helped that not a lot of the kids that showed up were very interested in trying the pawpaw--more for the adults!