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.