Just like Coca-cola is a mixture of sweet and acid, a Pavlova needs to have an acid topping to contrast the sweet suger shell.
Hence, passion fruit (traditional), kiwi fruit (modern).
In my experience, pavlova is never an ordinary day-to-day desert: it always used to be too difficult, and now that it’s not too difficult, it’s still too much trouble. And it is very sweet.
An important point is that Pavlova doesn’t keep. At all. You need to eat it fresh, or the cream goes flat, the fruit leaks out, and the crisp suger goes sticky. You can buy a shell now, it comes in a sealed plastic envelope, but once it’s open you have to finish it. You can make mini-pav’s, but then you are making individual deserts for each individual, so it’s more work and it’s not really a pav.
So it is a party/celebration food. It used to be supplied by a caterer or a really competent cook, and part of the joy is that it only turns up at party/celebrations. Which is one reason why mini-pavs are not real pavlova: it’s missing the important shared element you get from sharing a cake/desert.
Of course 1 in 4 Australians is born overseas now, and a lot of kids (like mine) have foreign parents, so a lot of people don’t have pavalova at their celebrations, but it is still common enough that the supermarket has a stack of shells on the shelf all year, not just at Christmas when people buy them for the big Christmas dinner.
LOL. In New Zealand the lamington still reigns with pride. They are available in every supermarket either in chocolate or raspberry coating. Either as individual cakes or as a sponge roll. Take them home slice in half insert whipped cream…yum!
And yes, occasionally they are still made in vast batches by mums to sell as fund raisers.
I ate a raspberry lamington with cream just yesterday - it was brought to work to farewell a lady colleague.
Have you ever tried a peppermint crisp? Trust me there is no way in hell I would eat one by itself but when teemed with the cream and crisp meringuey goodness it is fabulous.
Lamingtons are still ubiquitous in the supermarkets here. It’s the homemade breed that’s much rarer these days.
I made them once, found them too fiddly and never bothered again. One day the mother in law was saying she’d made her first ever batch of Lamingtons and they were so easy. I was surprised until I saw them - they were Lamington muffins! No wonder she thought they were easy. I jokingly said it was blasphemy to say they were Lamingtons, and she said “You just think they are supposed to be square because that’s how they are in the supermarket”. I still can’t believe how offensive I found that comment, but seriously! They’re part of our cultural heritage. Our grandmothers were cutting them into squares long before there were supermarkets. So rude!
Interesting. I’m hopeless in the kitchen but nevertheless almost everybody says pavs are easy to cook. Maybe fan ovens make the difference. Still, my much loved grandmother made superb pavs in a coal range oven and was admired by many for her skill at baking.
The pavlovas in the supermarkets here are not shells and I wonder if you mean meringues - which are sold as nests, individual servings and very nice too. But pavs are much more fluffy and airy. They are not the same as a home baked pav which has a moist inner and is the Mount Olympus of the art. Not at all easy to achieve.
A pavlova should last for a few days in the fridge: the main limitation is the whipped cream. But having said that, personally I would expect a pav to be eaten completely and anything left over to be burgled out of the fridge in short order.
Tomorrow [Australian time] being Federal election day all the polling places using a school hall will have a fund-raising cake stall outside.
Any readers who want to know what traditional Australian baking is should attend and marvel at the lamingtons, pavlova [if you’re lucky, and early] and sundry other recipes on sale for bargain prices.
Ok for the lamington purists - they should be made with stale cake only (that was the whole point - a way to use up stale cake. Mind you these days I buy a packet of sponge fingers to make mine). They may contain a thin smear of raspberry jam but are fabulous sliced not quite through diagonally with a slathering of whipped cream. The pink ones are called jelly cakes (well that’s what my nanna called them and she was a hospital cook and therefore an expert on these matters). They are made differently to the choc variety. To get the pink you mix up a batch of raspberry (sometimes other flavours - you know you are at an old school cake stall if there are 5 different colours of lamington) jelly (jello for the 'merkins) and let it go until not quite set. Then you dunk the cake in to get a coating and hit it with the coconut. Also made more fabulous by the addition on cream.
And cream. My sons’ Scout troop used to do a lamington drive every year. Everyone would muck in and help out with the coating, tossing etc and they were delicious lammies because they were cream filled. Mmmm, wish I had one right now.
I’m surprised not to see raspberry pavlova mentioned - maybe it’s a Scottish thing, but it was the pavlova we always had in my family. I’ve never made any myself due to a strong aversion to the texture and smell of raw eggs, and an understanding of the art of baking with eggs that amounts to “it’s sorcery”.
An aunt of mine was an exchange student in New Zealand (from California) in the early 60s. She’ s the one who introduced it to our family. She did make them with kiwifruit, but we also often had one with blueberries and strawberries on July 4th.
I still make one for a party once in a while and it’s always well received.
Me too. I checked it out and discovered that there was one kiwi restaurant in Paris (aptly named “Kiwi corner”) . And it did serve Pavlovas . Enquiring further for price and stuff, I discovered that after 20 years or so, it closed last year
I have never seen the words ‘Pavlova’ and ‘left overs’ in the same sentence.
I also believe no pavlova in history has ever lasted a ‘few days’. Even under strict scientific conditions, researchers are baffled that whenever they come into the lab on day 2 ‘The Pav has vanished!’.
Oh well, voted today, and yes, the primary school had the cake stall. Lamingtons, chocolate slices of all types, honey joys, lemon slice - mmm - the perfect finish to a meal that started with a sausage sizzle.
I bought this up a while back and was roundly told to fuck off by a lot of people, including one of the mods, IIRC. But I agree with you - a kiwi is a small flightless bird native to NZ, or a friendly term for someone from New Zealand. The delicious green fruit is a Kiwifruit and it actually bothers me quite a bit that people in the US seem wilfully ignorant of this or even choose to persist with the incorrect name when informed of their error.
…and to be strictly correct the Kiwifruit is originally a Chinese Gooseberry. However the nascent NZ horticulture industry in the 1960s found the Cold War associations of the name was a marketing nightmare. Thus the Kiwifruit was born.
I thought the point of using Zespri was that it was capable of being trademarked and protected, as opposed to kiwi/kiwifruit which is a generic term and not capable of protection. Of course, what may happen in particular stores overseas may be out of the control of Zespri.
Me too. My parents would drive to Tauranga every year and buy cases of mandarins/chinese gooseberries/tangerines/tangelos/tamarillo for the summer.
Apples/oranges/boysenberries/raspberries/strawberries/watermelons were local (Bay of Plenty).
Peaches/Plums/Lemon/Grapefruit/feijoa/crabapples/cape gooseberries/loquats grew in the garden.
Man, I love fruit.
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. And it did serve Pavlovas 
. Enquiring further for price and stuff, I discovered that after 20 years or so, it closed last year 