August 2026

Sweet Weekend: Easy Fruit Desserts (2)

We hope you enjoyed yesterday’s poached pears recipe (click here). Today we are continuing with our fruit desserts for the weekend. There’s currently an abundance of guavas on the farm where we live. We can’t always keep up with eating them fresh, and that’s when it’s time to take out the glass jars and make preserved guavas.

Sterilising glass jars:

But before we can start making preserved guavas, we first need to sterilise the glass jars. There are several ways to sterilise glass jars, but I do it the way my mum has been doing it for many years – in the oven.

  1. First clean the jars with hot, soapy water and rinse thoroughly to remove all the soap residue.
  2. Place the jars upright on a dry oven rack in a preheated oven of 135°C/275°F.
  3. ‘Bake’ the jars for at least 20 minutes (this duration is sufficient to kill most bacteria, yeasts and moulds).
  4. After 20 minutes, turn off the oven and open the door slightly to allow jars to cool for 10 minutes.
  5. Use jar lifters (or oven mitts like I have) and remove the hot jars from the oven. Now they’re ready to use.

Sterilised glass jars

Preserved Guavas in a syrup:

My mum often made preserved guavas when we were kids. And seeing that it’s guava season now, I decided that it’s a good time to make this delicious fruit dessert. Remember, the best guavas to use are the ones that aren’t too ripe.

Guavas fresh from the farm where we stay

Ingredients for preserved guavas in syrup

Ingredients:

2kg guavas, peeled and sliced in half

1 litre water

1½ cups sugar

2 cinnamon sticks

Method:

Add the water, sugar, and cinnamon sticks into a large pot on medium heat. Bring to the boil while stirring to dissolve all the sugar. Let it cook rapidly for about 10 minutes.

Boil water, sugar and cinnamon sticks

Add the guavas to the boiling syrup, bring back to the boil. Turn the heat down and boil gently for 5 – 8 minutes (the guavas must be soft and the pips start loosening, but not coming out of the guavas).

Add the guavas and cook for five minutes

Remove the pot from the stove and allow the guavas to cool a bit. Transfer the guavas into the sterilised jars, fill them to the top with syrup and seal tightly.

Tip: Turn the jars upside down until cold. Once cold, you can turn them right side up to store.

Preserved guavas

If you’re very generous and want to surprise a friend, you can always tie a colourful ribbon around the jar to make it look just as cheerful as the fruit inside.

Serve your guavas with ice cream, custard or whipped cream

We hope you enjoyed our weekend of fruit desserts!