This simple Latin guava pastry recipe uses store-bought guava paste, sweetened cream cheese, and includes a recipe and step-by-step instructions for making puff pastry at home.

In the eyes of my Hispanic husband, there is no greater treat in this world than guava and cheese pastelitos. And most of the time, I’m inclined to agree with him. Growing up outside of Miami, Latin pastries were everywhere. In my little community alone, there was a Colombian bakery, a Venezuelan bakery, a Peruvian bakery, and at least two Cuban bakeries. (Honestly, there were probably more but these are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head at this moment.) Many mornings, on the way to school, we would make a detour to Panna, a Latin bakery/cafe tucked inside of a gas station, where we would load up cafe con leches, empanadas, ham and cheese cachitos, and of course guava pastelitos.

Imagine my surprise my freshman year of college, when I moved only a few hours north to Orlando and discovered that I had relocated to a Latin pastry desert. The first weekend of classes, my roommate and I drove to four different Publix Supermarkets looking for ham croquettes and returned empty-handed to our dorm on the verge of tears. I’m happy to say that in the years since I first arrived in Orlando, the Latin pastry options have grown, but I have yet to find pastelitos as perfect as those from our South Florida gas station.

homemade guava pastries

So I made my own. The other day, I wrote about making puff pastry at home and though these pastelitos are best with homemade puff pastry, you can definitely use store bought if that’s more your style. They’re fairly simple to put together, filled with equal parts jazzed up guava paste and sweetened cream cheese. If you live in a place where guava paste is hard to get your hands out, I recommend seeking out a local Latin market if possible and supporting minority-owned businesses in your community (especially in the current situation). You can, however find it on Amazon and I will link a brand I use often at the bottom of the recipe.