Passion Fruit Coconut Pie

And some personal news!

I’m writing to you from my new kitchen — that I can’t wait to show you the moment it’s ready. That’s right, folks, easygayoven HQ has moved. We’re still in Brooklyn, but no longer in Williamsburg. I know Williamsburg gets a bad rap for being more like a mini-Manhattan the further you go toward the water. It’s the butt of every tech-bro-consultant-slop-bowl-lunch joke (deservedly so). But the neighborhood is obviously more expansive than that, especially the parts that haven’t been corporatized yet. I really liked living there for four years and I’m going to miss it.

So why am I moving if I liked it so much? One, someone bought our apartment building and, after telling us we could stay, reneged and said we had to GTFO because they wanted to gut the place and put in a walk-in shower so they could, I assume, jack up the rent $2,000. I probably would have stayed there for another year with my roommates (yes, I don’t think they ever appeared on the channel but I had two roommates). But two, this was the kick in the pants I needed to go out on my own (and, in a city like New York, I could finally afford to do it.) Three, the one-bedrooms there are expensive as hell!

I’m going to miss my big, bright kitchen, even with all its quirks. (Leaky windows, blasting furnace that heated the whole apartment, at one point mice — we got rid of them!) which was a one-in-one-thousand find. Most NYC apartments either have galley kitchens or some kind of internal set up. Needless to say, they’re usually small — giving more precious space and legally required windows to living rooms and bedrooms. That’s also why I had to be very picky when finding my new apartment, since the EGO operation relies heavily on a great working space.

I will really miss the tree outside the kitchen window that turns vibrant yellow for like week in the fall. I couldn't find better pictures. The photo on the right is after move-out day and me scraping up all the sugar I had caked onto the floors.

I was looking for a kitchen with at least two windows, big enough to fit my island worktop (yes, it goes where I go), that would ideally have southern exposure, and none of those rinky-dink ovens that you can’t even fit a half sheet tray into. And, reader, well, I got it! I know it sounds like I take this too seriously, and sure, plenty of creators have a great filming and recipe testing system without these things, but it was important to me not just logistically, but also creatively — and I try to remember that at least some of what I do here is art, or at least creative.

If you have been anywhere in a 30-yard radius of me for the past 4 months, you have heard me drone on about this journey so thank you for listening, I’ll find something new to whine about now. I’ve been slow to get back to developing new recipes because, when I moved in, I had no gas or electric — and therefore also no wifi. Before you say anything, I had put in requests for transfers on all of these services before moving. I’ll just spare you and say, getting someone to come out and replace your meter after a huge snow storm that left thousands of New Yorkers without power … not easy! Two days ago, a whopping four days after I had moved in, I finally got all three functioning at once.

And that’s what you missed on Glee!

I had a lot of passion fruit puree, fresh passion fruits, and coconut shreds lying around after my ultimate birthday cake. I wanted to use them up before the big move, so this was the last recipe I developed and shot in my old kitchen. Awww.

This passion fruit cream filling is just cooked over the stove, and because of the lower ratio of acidic lemon juice, it’s a bit looser and needs a longer chill time to hold its shape.

I wanted to use coconut cream for the topping but it didn’t work at all. This may have been because I didn’t use a dedicated can of coconut cream, opting to use the cream at the top of a can of coconut milk I had. It just didn’t have enough fat content and viscosity, so it never whipped up. But then I figured I would rather just have you use the three egg whites (that you separated from the yolks that the filling uses) to make a creamy meringue topping. (I don’t like having spare egg parts sitting in my fridge, either!) If you try whipping up some real coconut cream, sweetened with some sugar, let me know!

The fresh passion fruit rivers running down the ravines of meringue are optional because speaking from first hand experience, I know how hard it is to find. A toasting all over with a kitchen torch really takes it over the top.

Ingredients