April Flavor of The Month - Guava

Dear Friends,

It seems like yesterday we were celebrating New Year's, and here we are at the doors of April 2006, with Easter and Passover right around the corner.

For the Month of April we are proud to feature an old time favorite flavor - Guava. We have prepared a brief history on this great tasting fruit for your reading enjoyment.

Guava has to be one of my favorite fruits. As a kid, I used to love to eat Green Guavas, and would climb the trees at my grandma's farm to pick the biggest and greenest guavas I could find. Sometimes, I would not come down until my belly ached from eating so many guavas and salt.

Here in the good old US of A, green guavas are hard to come by and we usually enjoy them ripe and in the form of preserves. As a teenager, I used to love to eat little Cuban Guava tarts called "pastelitos". Once in a while I venture into the Pico-Union area of Los Angeles in search of these Cuban delights. Unfortunately, there aren't that many Cuban Pastries shops left in LA and they are becoming more difficult to find.

So, our Guava Alfajores are a tribute to all my Guava Memories. They make a wonderful afternoon snack with a nice cup of freshly brewed Split Bean Coffee.

Easter Offerings and Ordering Deadline

Along with our Guava Alfajores, we are also offering a Fancy Box of Guava Alfajores, covered in White Chocolate and Gold leafed with an Easter Theme. Be sure to view both our Flavor of The Month and our Seasonal Offerings Page, where you will find Guava Nougats covered in White Chocolate, as well a Super Size Alfajor (Alfajor Gigante) and Our Easter Baskets.

Be sure to order early. We would appreciate if you place your Easter orders prior to April 7th, but will try to accommodate as many orders as possible.

Indian Film Festival - April 19-23 2006

If you are looking for something to do in the Month of April, and you live in the Los Angeles Area, be sure to visit the Indian Film Festival April 19-23 at the Arc Light Theatres in Hollywood. This year we are donating a Gift Certificate for their Silent Auction. Last year we had the honor of attending the screening of Hari Om and enjoyed it tremendously. For more information be sure to visit their website at www.indianfilmfestival.org . You may also find a link to the website in our Circle of Friends Page .

www.SplitBeanCoffee.com

Split Bean Coffee introduces its Easter/Spring 2006 Collection

Split Bean Coffee introduces their Easter 2006 Collection of Artisan Alfajores

&

Hand-Crafted Marshmallows

The 2006 Easter collection features a “Marshmallow Bouquet” consisting of Rose Petal essence from the Middle East; Jasmine essence from Asia; and Lavender from our friends at the Hood River Lavender Farms in Oregon. These “heavenly pillows” are hand-crafted using natural ingredients.

Split Bean Coffee’s Dulces del Rocío Marshmallows are available in over 20 flavors (including strawberry, cherry, coconut, vanilla, orange, green tea, chocolate, raspberry), and can be specially crafted for your needs.

The 2006 Easter Collection also feature a Super Size Alfajor – Alfajor Gigante filled with either Guava or Dulce de Leche. Split Bean Coffee is also offering a Fancy Box of Guava filled alfajores covered in White Chocolate and Gold-leafed with an Easter theme. These beautiful and delicious alfajores make a wonder and unique gift for the Season. Can’t decide what to give these Easter Season, let Split Bean Coffee prepare a special Easter Basket that best reflects your taste and budget.

What is and alfajor you may ask? Alfajores are South American Shortbread cookies. These delicious treats are normally filled with Dulce de Leche (milk caramel) and lightly dusted with confectionary sugar. Split Bean Coffee offers a variety of standard unique flavors including Quince, Guava, Raspberry, Strawberry, Lucuma, and a chocolate covered variety. Recently featured in Los Angeles Magazine’s Food Lovers Guide, The Miami Herald, The Oregonian, and The Oklahoman, these cookies are just to die for!

ABOUT SPLIT BEAN COFFEE: Split Bean Coffee® is a Southern California based Micro-Roaster of single origin Nicaraguan Coffees, and confectioner of Artisan Quality Gourmet Sweets, featuring their world famous Alfajores La Misión® and their Dulces del Rocío® Award Winning Marshmallows.

Split Bean Coffee is a family owned business dedicated to the promotion and appreciation of Old Fashioned Coffees and Treats. Using family treasured recipes from their families in South America and The American South, they have combined the time honored traditions of people’s love for good quality coffee and the old-fashioned sweets traditions their grand-parents learned to love.

Split Bean offers a fine selection of Micro-roasted coffees, of which Nicaraguan Coffees is their flag-ship coffee. Grown in the highlands of the Matagalpa region, and minimally processed in a family member’s fair trade co-op farm. Split Bean Coffee’s commitment to its customers is to provide freshest roasted coffee every time. Each bag of coffee is roast-to-order to assure the customer always receives the freshest roast possible.

Split Bean Coffee also features a selection of hand-made Artisan Sweets, of which Alfajores La Misión® are their best seller. They are quickly becoming America’s favorite cookie.

Split Bean Coffee's products have been featured in several national publications including The Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Magazine, The San Jose Mercury News, Tu Ciudad Magazine, Specialty Food Magazine, The Dallas Post-Telegram, The Miami Herald, The Portland Oregonian, The San Fernando Valley Social, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Travel Savvy Magazine, The Oklahoman, The Candy Addict and Indulge Magazine.

In addition to Alfajores, Split Bean Coffee also makes Artisan Marshmallows, Toffee, Southern Peanut Brittle, & Chocolate Truffles. These products are available under the Dulces del Rocío® label. Split Bean Coffee was recently voted one of the Top Five Gourmet Marshmallow Makers by Travel Savvy Magazine.

www.SplitBeanCoffee.com

Split Bean Coffee Featured in The Candy Addict

It gives us great pleasure to announce we were featured in The Candy Addict! Here is the text from Brian's Review.

Sunday, March 12th, 2006

Review: Candy from Split Bean Coffee

You wouldn’t think a company called Split Bean Coffee would make candy, but they do. They sent me a package of all kinds of stuff to review - mostly candy and marshmallows, but some other things too:

Southern Peanut Brittle (seen above): I’ve never really cared much for peanut brittle, so I’m probably not the best person to review this. I tried it and thought it was OK, but I took the package with me to visit family and my mother-in-law LOVED it. Loved it so much she finished the whole batch. Good thing I tried it before the visit.

Almond Toffee: I love

Heath Toffee Bars so I was hoping this would be really good. Unfortunately, I wasn’t thrilled with it, not sure why. It didn’t have chocolate on it, it was toffee with sliced almonds. Maybe the lack of chocolate threw me, or maybe this was real toffee and I was used to inferior Heath toffee. Idunno….but my father-in-law loved it. He finished off the whole batch and said he would rate this toffee as a 9.5/10. So maybe it’s just me.

Gourmet Marshmallows: Much like the

Plush Puffs I reviewed previously, these marshmallows were dense. They sent me a real variety of flavors: coconut, rose, banana, and cherry:
Coconut: the coconut was coated in real coconut and had a nice coconut flavor throughout - not too overwhelming - very nice.

Rose: this was their featured flavor but like I said in

my review of Turkish Delight, I’m just not ready to taste rose. I didn’t like these at all. Rose must be an acquired taste.
Banana: this had a serious banana kick to it. It’s weird to taste banana flavor in a marshmallow.

Cherry: these too had some serious cherry flavor to them.
Marshmallows, to me, aren’t something I sit down and munch on. Most of the time they are an ingredient in other candies or in recipes. I could see these being used in some really creative recipes. You could make some really interesting s’mores out of them. I was thinking melting them down and using them as ice cream topping would be great too.
Along with the candy, they sent a few other non-candy items so I figured I’d review them too (even though they don’t quite fit into the site).

Coffee: As I said before, I don’t drink coffee, but my wife does, and she said the coffee is fabulous. The coffee they sent was the Nicaraguan Shade-Grown Single-Origin coffee that was 100% Arabica Beans.

Dulce de Leche Alfajores: Split Bean Coffee specializes in their alfajores (a South American shortbread cookie, traditionally filled with Dulce de Leche aka Milk Caramel). These were fantastic. We brewed a pot of the coffee and drank it while eating the cookies and it was wonderful. The ingredients are 100% natural - the shortbread cookie itself contains only flour, margarine, and sugar. The caramel filling contains only milk, sugar, and spices. The cookies are barely sweet and the caramel inside is also barely sweet but very tasty.

So, to summarize…..I wasn’t thrilled with the Almond Toffee and Peanut Brittle, but my in-laws loved them. The Gourmet Marshmallows would be great for recipes. The coffee and alfajores were phenomenal. If I were going to buy one thing from Split Bean Coffee, I’d get the alfajores, definitely.

Split Bean Coffee website

tags: candy, sweets, coffee, alfajore, alfajores, cookie, cookies, brittle, toffee
No Comments » - Posted in Candy, Reviews by Brian

A Brief History of Guavas and Our Split Bean Coffee Guava Products

A Brief History of Guavas and Our Split Bean Coffee Guava Products

One of the most abundant of fruit trees, the guava treee is almost universally known by its common English name or its equivalent in other languages. In Spanish, the tree is called guayabo, or guayavo, the fruit guayaba or guyava. In French it known as goyave or goyavier; in Portuguese, goiaba or goaibeira. Hawaiians call it guava or kuawa. It is also called by numerous dialectal names in India, tropical Africa and the Philippines where it is know as bayabas. Various tribal names–pichi, posh, enandi, etc.–are employed among the Indians of Mexico and Central and South America.

Origin

The guava is believed to have been cultivated by man for at least the past two thousand years. A native fruit/tree of Central America, it fairs best in the tropical and sub-tropical regions of the world. It is common throughout the tropical America and in the West Indies, and southern Florida where it it is believed to have been introduced in the mid 1800's.

Early Spanish and Portuguese colonizers introduced it to the East Indies during their voyages to the Eastern Colonies. It was soon adopted as a crop in Asia and in warm parts of Africa. Egyptians have grown it for a long time and it may have traveled from Egypt to Palestine. Guavas are occasionally seen in Algeria and on the Mediterranean coast of France. In India, guava cultivation has been estimated at 125,327 acres (50,720 ha) yielding 27,319 tons annually.

Guavas were introduced to Hawaii until the early 1800's. Now it occurs throughout the Pacific islands. Generally, it is a home fruit tree or planted in small groves, except in India where it is a major commercial resource. Colombia, Mexico, and Brazil are three of the major guava producers in the American continent.

There are over 15 commercially available types of guavas and they come in all shapes, sizes, and colors, but one thing is unique to all guavas, and that is the sweet intoxication aroma produce by this wonderful fruit.

Common Food Uses

Guavas can be eaten raw or may be cooked in preserves. In Latin America one of the most popular ways of perparing guavas, it to tewed guava shells (cascos de guayaba), that is, guava halves with the central seed pulp removed, strained and added to the shells while cooking to enrich the syrup. They are often served with a soft fresh cheese.

Guavas are also used to make candy bars; made with a rich guava paste and guava cheese are staple sweets, and guava jelly is almost universally available.

Split Bean Coffee's Alfajores la Mision and our White Chocolate covered Guava Treats are made with 100% Natural guava paste from Brazil. After testing several forms of guava paste, we decided that the Brazilian Guava paste held the best complemental charecteristics for our treats. We carry Guava filled alfajores (Traditional Style), as well as White Chocolate Covered Guava Alfajores and a limited selection of Guava Treats covered in White Chocolate.

www.SplitBeanCoffee.com

What makes our Alfajores Special

What Makes Alfajores La Misión by Split Bean Coffee Special

We at Split Bean Coffee receive our daily dose of inquiries and if there is one question that we always get asked by new customers is how are your Alfajores different then commercially produced alfajores from Argentina or Peru?

Our Alfajores stand-out against commercially produced alfajores from South American in many ways, so I thought I mentioned a few of qualities that make our Alfajores La Misión different.

1. Our Alfajores have no preservatives or additives

2. Our Alfajores are handmade in small controlled batches

3. Our Alfajores are made to order so you always receive the freshest product possible. We don’t believe in having our precious little treats sitting around.

4. Our Alfajores La Misión are made by us here in the USA. Other Alfajores are made in foreign countries and have to endure the torture of shipping in trans-oceanic containers, customs clearance, shipping to distributors. By the time they are shipped to the end-user, they could be weeks old.

5. Our Alfajores La Misión are 100% Lard Free

6. We use real chocolate covertures

7. Our comfitures are preservative/additive free

8. We use minimal packaging, so you pay for the cookies not the box. (Fancy packaging available at an additional fee.)

9. We don’t use a distribution platform, our Alfajores La Misión are only available from Split Bean Coffee.

10. You can’t just eat one and walk away from the box.

Get your own box at www.SplitBeanCoffee.com