With their cream cheese-spiked dough and guava paste centers, these cookies are infused with my Cuban heritage
As a teenage Latina immigrant newly arrived in the United States, I remember feeling that the act of making holiday thumbprint cookies was a part of the process of becoming a “real” American, as though mastering decorated cookies would somehow help me attain citizenship. While I did become an American, I don’t think it was due to the dozens of cookies I baked, or my participation in Hallmark holiday traditions.
Still, I adored the American thumbprint cookies of my adopted homeland. I have an affinity for jelly-filled sweets, so I naturally gravitated towards these colorful, jewel-toned treats — and it helped that they were as forgiving to make as they were delicious to eat. As I grew older, I started infusing them with my own Cuban heritage, swapping out the raspberry and apricot jellies for guava paste and adding cream cheese to the cookie dough for a Cuban American thumbprint cookie.
Guava and cream cheese is a classic Cuban combination. Its most well-known expression is the pastelito de guayaba y queso , a hand-held sweet consisting of flaky puff pastry filled with thick guava paste and a swipe of cream cheese. It is rumored that the addition of cream cheese to the pastries came in part from America’s influence on the island, which lasted from the aftermath of the Spanish-American War in the late 19th century until Cuba fell to communism in 1959.
These guava and cream cheese thumbprint cookies remind me of my own assimilation in the United States as a teen embracing my new American culture while maintaining my “Cubanity” or Latinidad. The guava paste is sweet and tropical with just a slight hint of tartness, while the cream cheese blended into the cookie dough adds balance, tempering the paste’s high sugar content into a mild sweetness.
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