Guava Cake

Guava Psidium guajeva is a small tree native to Mexico, Central America and northern Southern America, but are now grown throughout the tropics and in some subtropical regions too. The fruits have high vitamin A and C content and have a high quantity of pectin, this means they are particularly good for making jams and preserves. Guava paste is like a thick jam but with less added sugar and a great ingredient for cooking and baking.

Guava is one of the trees that are being planted through TREE AIDs work. In Northern Ghana, the community Nurseries and Woodlots Project in Kandema enables the local community to grow trees such as guava to help reduce deforestation. This is done by giving people the skills to grow the trees from seed in nursuries and then transplant them into woodlots, the species grown include Guava, Cashew and Mango. Guavas provide fruit for food and sale and wood for fuel and encouraging these trees to be cultivated sustainably improves the soils fertility.

Here is a recipe for you that contains guava paste, you can use guava jam but if you do this then use less sugar than the recipe tells you, otherwise it'll be too sweet! You should be able to get hold of Guava paste from any health food shop or international market, but I'm not sure if your average supermarket will stock it.


Tree Ingredients include Guava. This recipe was kindly donated by, CDKitchen.

Ingredients

170 g butter
230g sugar
460g flour
2 eggs
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
280g guava paste

Directions

• Preheat oven to 180 C, 350 F or gas mark 4.

• Cream butter. Add sugar little by little.

• Add eggs one by one, followed by vanilla.

• Sift flour together with baking soda and salt. Mix with the sugar/egg mixture.

• Pour half the batter in a greased square (8x8) cake pan. Cut the guava paste in slices and use the slices to cover all the batter. Pour the rest of the batter on top of the guava slices.

• Place in oven and bake for 45-60 minutes. Check cake for doneness (an inserted toothpick comes out clean) as oven temperatures varies.
  

We want your recipes...

So this week TREE AID are asking you for your tree cake recipes. We would love to try your favorite cake recipe or your experiments with tree ingredients. I have been defining tree ingredient as anything that comes from a tree, be it fruit, nut, seed or bark.

In the TREE AID office the fundraising team have a book club every fortnight. The team comes together to read about fundraising and to discuss and reflect on the fundraising initiatives and techniques used within the charity. As part of this a member of the team volunteers to bake a cake using tree ingredients. So send us your recipes and we'll have a go at baking them and I'll let everyone know how its going on the blog.

I only volunteer in the office one day a week, so will only receive your emails and recipes then, but I am very much looking forward to seeing what scrumptious cakes your going to suggest!

Please send your recipes to treeaidvolunteer@treeaid.org.uk

Bees and Trees: A Honey Cake

So although honey isn't directly a tree ingredient, blossom from fruit trees is so vital for the bees to make the honey I wanted to include it as a tree ingredient anyway. The mutually beneficial relationship between bees and trees is really quite beautiful and is nature working at its best. The trees rely on bees for pollination and as a reward the bees get the nectar from the flowers to produce their food; the honey.

As part of TREE AIDS work there are projects that focus on bee keeping and the planting of malliferous (honey producing) trees. In Burkina Faso as part of TREE AIDS work people are also tought how to build bee hives as well planting trees that are particularly good for bees, one of these being the Mango Tree. Projects like this one are really helpful in a number of ways, they are beneficial for the regeneration of land and increase biodiversity through the tree planting. Honey production also helps to create sustainable income generation for communities and honey becomes available for domestic use too.

Here's a recipe for you to try that is from a website called CDKitchen and looks absolutely delicious! Tree Ingredients include Cinnamon which comes from the bark of a tree, Cloves, Coffee and indirectly Honey.

Ingredients

560g cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
3 large eggs
230ml or 225g honey
230g sugar
230ml vegetable oil
120ml cup brewed coffee
60ml cup water

Directions

• Preheat oven to 350 F, gas mark 4 and generously grease pan.
  
• Into a large bowl sift together flour, baking powder, cinnamon, baking soda, salt, and cloves.


• In a small bowl lightly beat eggs. Make a well in center of flour mixture and add eggs with remaining ingredients, whisking until combined well.


• Pour batter into pan and bake for about 50 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean.
  


• Leave to cool on a wire rack.