pastelitos de guayaba - guava pastry

I seems to be a generally held truth that love fades. Long relationships - I am often told - develop from passionate love to friendship, collaboration, team-work and habit as one copes with every-day preoccupations together. Even though one can find comfort and security in a long-time partner life together gets a bit boring and one is said to miss the adventures and excitements of the initial crush. This, I believe, is just wrong.

The thing is all types of love has to be earned and deserved. One can never take a partner for granted.

I'm sure everyone has their own ways to make their partner fall in love with them again...and again. This is one of my "love potions" (and it works every time!).

In Havana pastelitos de guayaba are sold in the streets for 2 Cuban pesos a piece and they have been one of my husbands favorite treats for as long as he (and I) can remember. So, when a Cuban friend of mine gave me half a kilo of guava paste as a good-by gift when I was leaving Havana a couple of weeks ago I just knew what to do with it.

I had been in said city doing fieldwork for my thesis for three months while my husband was in Sweden studying and as if reading my thoughts my friend handled me the package with the words: "When you two get up from bed after your reunion you can recover some of that energy lost by eating this..."

Well, the half-kilo of guava paste will make lots of pastelitos so I guess I'm guaranteed a long and happy marriage!


This Cuban brand of guava paste is actually rather known, at least in other Spanish-speaking countries. My mother, for example, remembers it from her childhood in the Canary Islands. I guess the lovely lay-out of the package hasn't changed either...

I didn't make my own short pastry to make these but they turned out great anyways!

---

one 450 g rich short pastry-sheet
some guava paste

The short pastry-sheet I bought has rather thick so i had to roll it a little bit thinner. This should, however, not be made with leaf-thin dough. Cut the dough in squares, put some guava paste in the middle of each square and fold the corners to the middle. Wet the corners with some water as you fold to make them stick. Put on a baking sheet. Beat an egg and paint the pastry with it. Bake in 225 degrees C for 15 minutes.