Guava Cake Memories

I spend pretty much every afternoon at a local café/patisserie. It’s my friend Gesine’s (pronounced ga-zee-nah) place and it offers the most elegant and tasty pastries, richest café and loveliest staff— including her papi chulo husband Ray—but I’m coming to realize that it is not only the goodies or the people that bring me back day after day. Many people go there because her sister happens to be Sandra Bullock. You can always tell the type, their eyes dart behind the counter, peering through the two-way glass to get a glimpse of…of what? Celebrities crouching behind the mixer? Brad Pitt spooning out macaroons? I don’t know what they expect to see, but aside from being delusional I think they’re missing the point. For me there is something about the history behind what Gesine bakes that adds another level to the experience. I’m coming to realize that’s why I go.


If you talk to Gesine, or read her fabulous blog Confections of a Master Baker, you know that almost every delectable item in her store has a history. Some were her dearly departed mother’s favorites, others were served every Christmas when she lived in Germany. Earlier today as I bit into a small piece of Gesine’s pecan pie I was thinking about my favorite thing to bake. Yes, if you read my earlier posts you know I hate to cook, but baking has always been different for me. And I love to bake guava cake. Even the smell of the freshly opened can of guava paste is enough to make me swoon, but I found myself wondering why? For Gesine baking is a connection with the mother she misses so much, with a culture whose ingredients run through her veins, but my mother never baked. I mean never. Inspired by Gesine I wondered if there was meaning in this ritual for me.



I tried to think back to the first time I ate guava cake in Puerto Rico. It was a trip when I was 29, yes, then I remembered. Did I go alone, I wondered? It was then that it hit me. It was when my sister Ellen and I brought our mother down to visit Puerto Rico. She was very ill with heart disease, and her health was such that my sister suggested the warm break from the icy Vermont winter might be good for her. My three year romantic relationship was ending, so I agreed to go and left with a heavy heart and a carelessly packed suitcase.


The trip was subdued, Mom stayed with her aunt and Ellen and I with our young aunt Georgina. Mom had to rest quite a bit, so my sister and I tried to have some fun in between caring for her. We drove around the island (Anatia was scandalized! Two women driving around alone was not safe!) and went out on the town with our cousin Carlos. But I was taken aback when on the third night family members began to arrive for a dinner at our Aunt Concha’s house. We saw many of our family whenever we were down, but the logistics of a Davila gathering of this type meant it never happened. Never. When my great uncle Carlos arrived (he was well into his late 80s and as a retired Supreme Court judge and the patriarch of the family we always came to him, never him to us), it really hit me: this was really her last trip. Mom would never come down to visit again.

I tried to keep my emotions in check—rather un-stereotypically the Davila side of my family is very reserved emotions-wise—but it got harder and harder as the night wore on. Oh there was laughing and family stories, but also an underlying sadness. After a dinner I had merely pushed around on my plate, Concha sat a large platter of pastries in front of me. I could see the buttery richness as the edges of the yellow cake crumbled in moist petals, the deep hibiscus red of the guava centering each piece like a heart. I could hear my mother’s melodic if breathless voice riding in from the porch as I grabbed a piece. I bit into it without thinking, and stopped short as the tastes reached my tongue. It was incredible. The rich yellow cake was moist and elegant, the sharp sweetness of the guava like an unexpected kiss after an embrace. It was literally the best thing I had ever tasted. I proceeded to eat four pieces as my Tía Concha smiled at me from across the room. “Perhaps you can bring a piece to your mama,” she suggested. I gathered a small square in a napkin and brought it out to my mother who was rocking on the porch as usual, chatting with my tíos and tías, primas and sobrinos. As she ate I sat in another gliding chair, and joined the conversation about my Tio Victor’s farm and his old jalopies, the Bayamón air heavy around us, the coquis performing their chorus from the trees that wreathed the property.

Mom lived for another 18 months after we returned, but she was never well enough to make the trip again.


This afternoon, as I pulled out the round can of guava paste (hard to find in northern Vermont, let me tell you!) from the cabinet, I decided I will make a batch tomorrow. Perhaps I’ll even bring a plateful into Gesine’s. I have to wonder…maybe the reason the shop is so busy all the time is that we all have versions of Tia’s cake that tastes of memories. Though the guava cake is not something I had as a child, or that generations of my family made (truthfully, Concha was the only good cook in the family), the heavenly aroma of it baking brings a different kind of feeling to me. One of comfort and family. Of warm summer evenings and rustling palm leaves. So even though Gesine’s pastries are reflective of her memories, not mine, they were made with hands that folded in layers of emotion and meaning along with sugar, butter, eggs and flour. These baked goods are infused with the feeling of home, and it doesn’t even matter whose. Within her Mandelhoernchen is the same love and affection, its ingredients infused with the same abilities to conjure memories of home for anyone who eats them.

Do you have a guava cake or Mandelhoernchen in your life?

Concha’s Guava Cake

½ lb. butter (melted)
2 cups of sugar
4 eggs
4 cups self-rising flour sifted
½ 12oz. can guava paste

Slice thin pieces of guava paste.

Mix sugar, eggs and butter (cooled). Mix for one minute. Add flour in three stages. Grease pan with butter.

Pour half of batter (will be thick like bread dough) in bottom of pan. Place ½ of guava slices on top of batter with pieces arranged evenly. Then spread remainder of batter (carefully) over top, and arrange remaining guava slices on the top.

Bake at 325° for 50-60 minutes.


¡Buen Provecho!

Easter eggs on snow

On this, my 16th Easter in Vermont, I find myself driving around in the blinding snow as I rush around to buy last minute candy for my eleven year old son’s basket. No, he no longer believes in the Easter bunny, but I will continue to make up a basket for him, probably until he’s 45. There’s something about the ritual beyond the religious implications, or the commercial ones, something that harkens back to a simpler time for me, one of the few from the short time when we were a complete family of seven before my father’s death.

My childhood memories of Easter in our small 1960’s New Jersey town are so vivid they are in Technicolor. My mother would spend weeks sewing a holiday outfit for me. The coordinated outfit was completed with a straw hat, a pair of white gloves and shiny patent leather mary-janes. I would endure church with my parents and four older siblings, restless throughout because after mass we would participate in the community Easter egg hunt. I can still see the green field now, with the brightly colored eggs peeking out from behind the trees and shrubs. It was always a sunny day with blue skies and moderate temperatures. Then we would return home and the sugar bacchanalia would commence. I would spend the rest of the afternoon trying to protect my chocolate bunny from my three greedy brothers. Usually my father would be the one to bite its head off. Despite the gluttony of the men in my family, the warmth of those Easter Sundays is what I recall first.

Years later, with these pleasant memories of my childhood in mind I looked forward to sharing these rituals with my own child one day. A year after my arrival in Vermont I married a native Vermonter and settled down in this great state, two years later our son Carlos was born. On Carlos’ second Easter I dragged my husband away from his Sunday coffee and loaded our son into the car for his first Easter egg hunt. I focused on the rare sunshine, ignoring the bitter cold wind and straw-like frozen fields, and threw a cute beribboned basket into the back seat for him to collect candy and eggs in. As we drove up to the Trapp Family Lodge, my husband grumbled about the cold weather as I cheerfully reminded him that this was Carlos’ first Easter egg hunt and I wanted it to be special. We stepped out of the car and were walking toward the field when Carlos let out a blood-curdling scream. I looked down at him certain that his life was in danger when I noticed him pointing ahead with a look of abject terror on his face. I followed the line of his chubby finger to see a young woman in an Easter bunny costume. I knew right then and there that it was not going to go as I had pictured. I scooped him up and made a wide turn around the evil Easter bunny woman and we gathered with the rest of the parents. You could tell the experienced ones as they had a look on their faces similar to my husband’s. The look said, “Let this be over quickly so I can go back to my warm bed!”

As the hunt commenced I felt the first drops of precipitation. In that moment I realized just how cold it was. Soon the sleet started to come down in earnest. There was a quick grabbing of eggs and candy (with the parents helping out in a hurry to get it the hell over with). My husband returned with Carlos on his shoulders and they were both shoving candy in their mouths in an attempt to derive some pleasure from the experience. At that point our hosts began serving the free Ben & Jerry’s ice cream with polar fleece gloves on. As we stood there in 30-degree weather with sleet pounding on our heads and shoveling ice cream in our mouths with gloved hands, Carlos began to cry. In my disappointment and disillusionment I suggested we head for the car and on to home. That was the first time I saw my husband smile that day.

After so many years of holidays spent in the great white north, I’ve finally accepted the weather piece of it. The days of green, sunny egg hunts are probably behind me now: they just don’t seem to come that way here. (I should have known when during my first spring here I heard about the sunrise Easter Sunday service on Mount Mansfield where the congregation skis down the mountain at its completion). But I’ve never stopped enjoying putting together the Easter basket, and the egg hunts (only now they are often on a white background instead of green). For some reason it is on this day that I miss my father the most, gone 37 years now. Easter was important to him, I don’t know why. Maybe because unlike me, he was a religious person, but perhaps, like me, the day represents a return to a childlike joy. That’s why we looked the other way when he raided our candy. It was fun to see him shoveling chocolate in his mouth and searching for brightly colored eggs in the bushes. It was indeed, joyous. And though right now Carlos’ favorite part is that it is one of two days a year I allow him to eat candy in the morning, I hope there is more he will remember. A day of bright colors and sweet tastes. A day of rebirth and new promise. And the gift of another day our little family can celebrate together. And perhaps in loving memory of my father, I will bite the head off of Carlos’ chocolate Easter bunny.