Making (and Eating) a Pawpaw Cake

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You'll recall that toward the end of September, NJ called dibs on as many pawpaws as it took to extract a cup's worth of pawpaw pulp, with an eye toward making a pawpaw cake. And so, we used two of our final pawpaws of the season to process and freeze some pulp.

Mid October found us ready to make the pawpaw cake, which is something we made a handful of times in Virginia but is also something that (for lack of pawpaws) we haven't eaten in maybe nine years. Here's our cake-making adventure.

NJ got out the old family recipes and among them, we found the pawpaw cake recipes. There are two cake recipes on this piece of paper. We used the second one to make this cake. (As always, click the image to enlarge it, and you'll be able to read the recipe.) Wish I could say it was passed down through the generations as a kind of esoteric pawpaw knowledge, but we're first-generation pawpaw people, so it's just a recipe we found on the internet around 2005. I think it was from the KSU pawpaw site.

We started off getting out the dry stuff.

As I poured the sugar into the measuring cup, the spoon we keep in the bag surprised me by sliding out and sticking straight up.

After mixing the dry stuff together, we started another bowl for the wet stuff.

Meanwhile, the pawpaw pulp sat unsuspecting on the counter, having thawed in the fridge for a day or two.

Adding the eggs.

And now adding the pawpaw pulp. Important to note that although we planned on processing only a cup of pulp, we went overboard so this is about a cup and a half of pulp. We decided it wouldn't hurt the cake to have 50% more pawpaw pulp than the recipe called for.

You'll see I've included five pics of me dumping the pulp into the bowl. At first I worried that this might border on over-representing this step in the process. But since most readers here will be specifically interested in the pawpaw aspect of this cake, I decided I could get away with five pics. Six or seven pics would be pushing it. (And if I showed even two pics of measuring the baking soda, that would already be over-representation. No offense to anyone who curates a blog about baking soda, but it's true: baking soda never merits more than one photograph in any context.)

The pulp ready for mixing.

Then we went back to the bowl full of dry stuff...

...and poured it into the wet stuff...

...and mixed.

The cake batter was ready to go into the pan.

So I sprayed the pan...

...thoroughly.

NJ was good enough to get some of the beaters' excess batter off before...

...she did something I don't do, since I'm afraid of raw eggs. (I know that makes it sound like I'm not very adventurous, and by the metric of eating raw eggs, I'm not. Maybe someday I'll be able to turn over a new leaf.)

Look at this--she looks just as healthy after licking the beater as she did before she licked it. It's beginning to seem like that salmonella is just a gummit conspiracy!

Still rejoicing in NJ's continued health, I coaxed the batter out of the bowl and into the pan.

Into the oven it went!

The recipe said to cook it for 50 minutes, but NJ thought we should set the timer for 35 minutes and check it then.

Meantime, it was a 35 minutes of living dangerously, for NJ at least.

Actually, it was a 32 minutes of living dangerously, because after 32 minutes, NJ thought we should check it, and we realized  it was done. Eighteen minutes ahead of schedule. So glad NJ was suspicious of the recipe. Following it chapter-and-verse could have ruined the cake!

After realizing we would have burned the cake if it had cooked for 50 minutes, I emended the recipe, making it Utah-specific, knowing that baking at different elevations can make things turn out differently. The recipe is from the Frankfort State Journal, according to the attribution. Frankfort, Kentucky, is about 500 feet above sea level, while our town in Utah is about 4500 feet above sea level.

But then I kept thinking about things, and I realized that (as far as I know) the higher the elevation, the slower the cooking, since water boils at a lower temperature up higher. So, if I was understanding things right, my elevation explanation was probably faulty. According to elevation, maybe it should have taken longer to cook in Utah than in Frankfort Kentucky? I was so confused at this point that I emended my emendation, adding four more words.

(By the way--sorry these previous two pics aren't oriented right. I've spent too long trying to orient them and need to move on.)

Then it was time to make the cream cheese frosting. The frosting recipe also appears on the piece of paper at the beginning of this blog post).

You'll notice that a pizza starts showing up in the background. The pizza (and two others like it) were for the same event as we were making the pawpaw cake for.

Powdered sugar went flying.

Onward, toward the next step.

This was the icing on the cake.

No, this was the icing on the cake.

The phrase "real birthday" is from Tennessee Williams's play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, when Big Mamma walks into Brick's bedroom holding a birthday cake and says, "We're bringing you in some real birthday." At least, that's what Big Mamma says in the film. Now that I think about it, I don't remember if that's how it is in the play itself.

After we made the cake and cooked the pizzas and the guests arrived, I opened some presents.

Among the presents: a ristra, or a hanging bouquet of red chiles! I made a ristra by my own hand several years ago and it hung under our carport for a long time, but finally a wind storm knocked it down and and destroyed it. Earlier this year we went to New Mexico and saw a lot of ristras and got back into a ristra state of mind, so NJ was the true best and thought to get me one!

After presents, the lights went out and we beheld the flaming glory of what may be the first pawpaw cake ever made in Utah. (Of course, it might not be--as I've learned from keeping this blog, several other people are growing pawpaws in Utah, so there may have been a handful of Utah pawpaw cakes that predate this cake of October 2016. Congratulations to those of you who may have beat us to it!)

Smiling for the camera.

Doing what needed to be done to claim the wish that was mine.

I made it in one breath. Proof I'm still in my prime.

Pawpaw cake and chocolate ice cream with cashews.

This was the scene on the counter the morning after. And by the evening of the morning after, there was no more pawpaw cake to be had, and we knew it would stay that way, in our house anyway, until the 2017 harvest.

Pawpaws Changing Color!

Here are some pics of the pawpaws changing color out in the yard:

The next few pics show the Shenandoah (foreground) and the Atwood (background).
The Wells isn't doing much yet.

Here are the seedlings that I planted from seeds in March of this year.

Oh by the way, congratulations to Bob Dylan for winning the Nobel Prize for Literature!

Pawpaw Harvest Is Finished!

We harvested the first pawpaw of the year on Sept 1 and, eighty pawpaws later, we harvested the final group of four pawpaws today, Oct 2. So it's been 32 days of harvesting at a rate of 2.5 pawpaws per day. Honestly, it's been exhausting...I'm just kidding. An average of 2.5 pawpaws a day for 32 days--that's easy.

I'm posting the completed pawpaw harvest tracking charts for the three trees that have born fruit this year. I'm anticipating that with this data-set placed online, a series of graphs will come into existence through crowd-sourcing. I'm just kidding about that too...since this blog would need to have a crowd of readers if it were to elicit crowd-sourcing of any kind.

The four final pawpaws, harvested from the Wells today, made into a still-life with Great Value cream style sweet corn. The cans of corn for perspective and the still-life for aesthetics.

Fruit Stems and Fossils

One thing I hadn't realized about pawpaws until this year: when they grow in clusters, they require a hefty stem to nourish them, and when the fruit has fallen, the stem looks otherworldly, like it might be from another geological age, like it might fit in better among fossilized clams and snails than in a compost pile. Here's a pic I took the other day, as if the stem fit in better among remnants of the Pleistocene than composting today in the Anthropocene. (No offense to the Holocene for skipping it, as if geological ages could be offended.)

Pawpaw Pulp for a Pawpaw Cake

Back around 2004 when we were foraging pawpaws in Virginia, we picked a lot of pawpaws--so many that we couldn't eat them all before they went bad. So we would freeze them and use the pulp all year for things like putting on our toast, mixing into oatmeal, and making birthday cakes. The cakes were really good, with cream cheese and lemon frosting.

So we're making a cake this year, and the recipe calls for a cup of pawpaw pulp. To get the cup of pulp, I drew on the two big pawpaws I recently harvested from the Wells. I cut the smaller of the two big pawpaws open and spooned out the pulp into a measuring cup.

This is how much I had after the first half of the pawpaw.

Here's a cup of pawpaw in a ziplock bag. It turned out to be one and a half pawpaws worth of pulp.

Ready to go into the freezer until mid-October.