The taste of summer

Every year at around this time I start looking for passionfruit recipes to use the glut of fruit we have from our vine. This year I stumbled across a recipe I had cut out from a magazine years ago and stored away in my recipe folder but never used. It was for passionfruit cordial and since it sounded incredibly easy and totally delicious I thought I'd give it a go! Sorry, I have no idea of my source for this one but here it is:

Passionfruit Cordial

• 4 cups caster sugar
• 2 cups water
• 1 cup passionfruit pulp
• 1 teaspoon citric acid

Place sugar, water, passionfruit pulp and citric acid in a medium saucepan over medium heat and stir until sugar is dissolved. Bring to the boil, remove from the heat and allow to cool. Store in the fridge for up to 4 weeks.

Use it like regular cordial and top up with iced water, or sparkling or soda water for a delicious day-time drink (we use our SodaStream to make almost-free sparkling water, which we drink on its own and mix with just about everything!). For an evening twist, add a shot of white rum - we served this up to our friends Denis and Laura the other night and they declared it the pefect summer drink! I imagine gin or vodka would also work well, and I'd like to try adding a shot of the cordial to a glass of sparkling wine, too - yum!

If you don't grow your own passionfruit you could also make this using store-bought fruit or even the passionfruit pulp you can buy in a jar. The fruit you buy are much larger than the home-grown version, though - I used about 15-20 passionfruit from our vine for this recipe but you would probably only need 4 or 5 store-sized fruit.

I promise if you give this recipe a go you'll be declaring it the taste of summer before long!