Sparkly sugar pillows filled guava pastry cream. # 314: Guava Cream Doughnuts

These little beauties have so many close cousins around the world: malasadas, sufganiyot, and pączki to name a few. A true “great minds think alike” situation.

What color do you imagine when you think of guava? My mind immediately goes to the thick layer of pink icing on top of the coconut cake we’d have at my university’s annual luau. Joke’s on me though: there are white guava as well, and they’re the more common variety found in California and Mexico.

Then why is the filling pink you ask? I waved my magic wand (ahem pink food coloring) so it would match the image of the doughnut I’d been dreaming about all week. That’s what I get for not doing my research before buying a new fruit.

I wonder if I could identify the bakes from a line up of my mise en place photos… Probably not honestly! It’s amazing how many bakes start with flour, butter and yeast.

Purple nails help with the kneading process.

Sweet dreams lil dough ball. Think floofy thoughts.

Gotta lean into the artsy shadows.

Recipes always suggest flouring the board before rolling dough into neat balls, but I’ve found they need the friction to convince them to stay in their new shape.

I was today years old when I learned the metal clip MOVES. Are you serious. I’ve been holding the candy thermometer by the plastic cap so it doesn’t scrape the bottom of the pan for years. The more you know.

The oil was a little too hot, leading to extra browning on the outside and a denser crumb on the inside. They still cooked through, but if the oil temperature had been lower they would have been a little fluffier. Still yum!

Pink glitter sugar? Obviously! Throwback to the strawberry jam doughnut/muffins from 2021.

Bejeweled.

I used my regular pastry cream recipe for the filling with puréed guava added in.

Channeling my inner Elphaba and defying gravity to get them to stand up by themselves.

Happy munching!

Recipe from: Crumb by Ruby Tandoh