Guava and Cream Cheese Twists

For our final cookie of the week, we took guava paste (pasta de guayaba in Spanish) and put it in a cream cheese dough. Pretty simple, eh? These weren’t bad, but they weren’t that impressive either.

The recipe is from the 2021 holiday cookie collection in the New York Times, entitled 24 Days of Cookies.

On Saturday morning, my daughter and I went to Perola’s to pick up the guava paste. At home, Dr. S made the dough, which resembled many rugelach doughs since it incorporated cream cheese. After rolling it thin, she used a ruler to measure out even rectangles, then placed a strip of the paste across diagonally. My daughter helped to close them up. We skipped the chilling and decorating part.

After baking, I was surprised that the dough did not puff up and open up. This is common with other cookies like hamantaschen, but I suppose the lack of any leavener kept this cookie fairly flat.

I wanted to like this cookie more: the shape was interesting, and I like the use of guava, something I don’t normally keep on hand. But the filling got a little too dark and chewy, and the cookie itself didn’t have enough contrast in flavour.