Pink, fluffy, and sweet — but not too sweet — guava cake is the stuff dreams are made of. This cake has long been part of many celebrations for families in the South Bay, and its popularity is spreading.
At a recent farmers market in San Jose’s Japantown, Jay and Gail Schwartz are giddy with anticipation after picking up two mini guava cakes from Sue’s Bites and Delights. They’ve made the drive over the hill from Santa Cruz to get the cakes for their anniversary, because the confections remind them of their original wedding cake, from Aki’s Bakery in San Jose.
“It was for important or special occasions,” says Gail, a longtime Santa Cruz resident. “We’ve been coming here for decades, and it’s always been so good. I’ve never had a cake like Aki’s. They’re very light, and the frosting was great. The filling was incredible.”
Sue’s Bites and Delights
Aki and Suyeko “Sue” Toyoshima pose inside their popular San Jose shop, Aki’s Bakery, in an undated photo. (Photo courtesy of Darryl Tom)
If the cake tastes familiar, maybe it’s in the DNA. Sue’s Bites and Delights owner Darryl Tom is the grandson of Aki and Suyeko “Sue” Toyoshima, original owners of Aki’s Bakery in San Jose. The first shop opened in 1963 on Jackson Street in the heart of the city’s quaint Japantown, and then a second bakery opened a few years later on Meridian Avenue in the Midtown neighborhood. The Toyoshimas sold Aki’s Bakery in 2007. Although the bakery has been closed for nearly two decades, South Bay diners still long for the taste.
Five years ago, when Darryl was a new father, he came up with an idea.
“I couldn’t sleep, and I just had a crazy idea of bringing the guava cake back again, because since the bakery had closed up, there hadn’t been anybody in our family doing it,” he recalls.
But Darryl’s mother Penny Tom was surprised by his suggestion.
“That was not on the radar that any of the kids would want to actually put in the work to bring back the guava cake,” she says.
Darryl Tom and his siblings stand between his mother Penny Tom and grandmother Suyeko “Sue” Toyoshima outside Aki’s Bakery on Meridian Avenue before it closed in 2007. (Photo courtesy of Darryl Tom)
The elder Tom grew up in her parents’ bakery, working on weekends starting in high school and then part-time during college and afterward.
“It’s a lot of work,” she says. “Get up early, come home late and you work weekends, so you miss a lot of your kids growing up.”
Even Darryl spent many hours in the back of the bakery as a kid with his jichan, or grandfather.
“To keep me occupied, because I just had so much energy, they would just give me layers of cake and frosting and just say, ‘Just do whatever you want,’ so I would hide figurines in the cake. I put frosting everywhere,” he says with a laugh.
Darryl and Penny Tom pose with a mini guava cake at the Sue’s Bites and Delights booth at San Jose’s Japantown Farmers Market on June 14, 2026. (Photo by Grace Hwang Lynch)
It took a year and a half for Darryl and his mother to figure out the logistics of bringing back their baking business. Darryl currently lives in Fresno, but the guava cake fan base is in San Jose. Plus, he is the primary caregiver for two young children.
The solution? Instead of opening a brick-and-mortar business, they started a pop-up working one week of each month out of Cake Expressions in Santa Clara. The name of their new business, Sue’s Bites and Delights, is an homage to Darryl’s grandmother (and Penny’s mother) Sue. They began selling their individually sized cakes at San Jose’s Japantown Farmers Market and soon moved to taking preorders online for small cakes in guava as well as passion fruit and yuzu strawberry flavors, and eight-inch round guava layer cakes.
Guava cake aficionados have long had their sources for their beloved treat. Versions of the dessert are on the menu at South Bay bakeries such as Flour Flower, La Patisserie and BiBi, and copycat recipes can be found on the internet, often involving strawberry cake mix, guava juice concentrate and cream cheese or Cool Whip. But certain renditions of the cake are especially nostalgic.
Honey and Pearl
Tamara Esparza creates a guava cake in the kitchen of Honey and Pearl on Sunday, June 28, 2026, in Emerville. (Aric Crabb/Bay Area News Group)
Another popular way to buy this tropical treat is through the pop-up Honey and Pearl, which vends occasionally at the Branham Plaza shopping center in San Jose and every weekend out of a commercial kitchen in Emeryville. Honey and Pearl was founded 10 years ago by baker and co-owner Tamara “Tam” Esparza.
“Funny story is I actually was known for my red velvet cake, and I also did a vegan mocha crunch cake — a vegan chocolate cake with a vegan honeycomb — those were the two most popular cakes I was making,” Esparza says.
But one day, she baked a guava cake for her husband, Vinnie Esparza, who convinced her she needed to sell it.
A guava cake sits in the kitchen of Honey and Pearl on Sunday, June 28, 2026, in Emeryville. (Aric Crabb/Bay Area News Group)
Tamara Esparza creates a guava cake in the kitchen of Honey and Pearl on Sunday, June 28, 2026, in Emeryville. (Aric Crabb/Bay Area News Group)
Tamara Esparza creates a guava cake in the kitchen of Honey and Pearl on Sunday, June 28, 2026, in Emeryville. (Aric Crabb/Bay Area News Group)
Tamara Esparza creates a guava cake in the kitchen of Honey and Pearl on Sunday, June 28, 2026, in Emeryville. (Aric Crabb/Bay Area News Group)
Tamara Esparza creates a guava cake in the kitchen of Honey and Pearl on Sunday, June 28, 2026, in Emeryville. (Aric Crabb/Bay Area News Group)
Tamara Esparza creates a guava cake in the kitchen of Honey and Pearl on Sunday, June 28, 2026, in Emeryville. (Aric Crabb/Bay Area News Group)
Tamara Esparza creates a guava cake in the kitchen of Honey and Pearl on Sunday, June 28, 2026, in Emeryville. (Aric Crabb/Bay Area News Group)
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A guava cake sits in the kitchen of Honey and Pearl on Sunday, June 28, 2026, in Emeryville. (Aric Crabb/Bay Area News Group)
“It was like eating a delicious fluffy cloud that wasn’t too sweet,” Vinnie says. “It was like the lightest cake I’ve ever had. And really, I just found myself just eating the entire thing, and was like, OK, this is really a problem for me. So, we need to make this available for everyone else.”
“The guava cake is definitely the superstar as far as popularity is concerned,” says Vinnie, who is now CEO of Honey and Pearl. He hopes guava cake will develop an equally passionate fandom in the East Bay. “Folks that are in San Jose telling their friends that are live up here, ‘Oh, you have to try this cake!’”
The Esparzas say the guava cake often draws in new customers, who they hope will try other specialties, such as guava strawberries and cream cake or chocolate dream cake.
Taste of Hawaii for the Bay Area
On its website, Sue’s Bites and Delights also offers an 8-inch guava cake. (Photo courtesy of Sue’s Bites and Delights)
At its most basic level, guava cake is a variation on the classic chiffon cake, known for its light and fluffy texture.
The chiffon cake recipe was developed by an insurance salesman and home cook named Harry Baker in the 1920s and sold to General Mills in 1947. The company popularized the recipe under the Betty Crocker banner after World War II. Using vegetable oil instead of butter or shortening allows the crumb to stay moist and tender even when refrigerated, which makes it an especially good pairing with fillings made of fruit or whipped cream.
But the technique is just as critical as the ingredients. For a chiffon cake, the egg whites are separated from the yolks and beaten with sugar into a meringue and then gently folded with the rest of the ingredients, causing the batter to rise tremendously when baked. This airy style remains popular in Asia and among Asian American bakeries.
How did this tropical-flavored treat find its way to San Jose? The Toms trace guava cake back to Dee Lite Bakery in Honolulu. Aki Toyoshima met the owner of Dee Lite at a bakers’ convention in Minneapolis during the 1970s.
“Being the only Asian bakers there, they kind of just met and hung out together, and then a couple years later, we went to visit their bakeries, and that’s when they exchanged recipes, because there was no competition, because we were in the (contiguous) states, and then they were on the island, so they shared recipes,” Penny remembers. “We gave them some of ours, and then they gave us a guava cake, and the coconut and Dobash cake.”
Guava cake, which has roots in Hawaii, put Aki’s Bakery in San Jose on the map. (Photo courtesy of Darryl Tom)
With San Jose’s diverse population, including people who had migrated from or vacationed in Hawaii, the tropical flavor took off. In the five decades since this island treat landed in the Bay, tastes have evolved – and so have the recipes. If you compare guava cakes available today from different bakeries in the Bay Area, they range from vibrant flamingo pink to off-white and the flavors may be pronounced and tart or just a whisper of fruitiness.
It turns out that Tam Esparza has her own connection to Aki’s Bakery. She worked as the front-of-house manager under the second owner, after the Toyoshimas sold it.
Esparza emphasizes that she is not offering the same menu as Aki’s. She has done extensive taste testing to make the recipe her own. Her biggest guide? Her mother.
“My mom is Korean, so I’m like, ‘Would my mom eat this?’ And the guava cake is her absolute favorite cake; like, that’s all she wants. She’s like, ‘You’re not coming over unless you bring one,’ so like, if there’s a barbecue, her birthday, it has to be guava.”
Tamara Esparza boxes a guava cake in the kitchen of Honey and Pearl on Sunday, June 28, 2026, in Emeryville. (Aric Crabb/Bay Area News Group)
Even at Sue’s Bites and Delights, they’re not exactly using their grandfather’s recipe, which was sold as part of Aki’s Bakery. The quantities they are working with are much smaller, and the technique for mixing the delicate chiffon batter needed to be adjusted.
Ingredients have changed, and even taste buds have shifted. But they aim to stay true to the spirit of Aki’s guava cake, relying on original customers as taste-testers. When asked if he can elaborate more on their ingredients and technique, Darryl simply says, “No.”
Tam Esparza is even more emphatic when asked about the secrets to her guava cake.
“I would have to kill you,” she jokes, adding, “I speak life into everything that I make, so that is really what you’re tasting. You’re really tasting the passion and the joy that we have with creating all of our products.”
And ultimately, perhaps the actual selling point of guava cake is not a flavor, but a feeling. “It’s nostalgia; it brings back their childhood,” Darryl says. “So it just stays with them in their memory, and that taste, because it’s always associated with something good, and so we have people constantly coming back to hopefully get that memory again.”
Grace Hwang Lynch is a San Jose-based freelance writer and author of the memoir “How To Cook Rice: On the Care and Feeding of an Immigrant Family.”
Places to find guava cake
While Aki’s Bakery may have set the bar for guava cake in San Jose, there are actually quite a few shops in the South Bay and East Bay serving this delicacy. Here are a few suggestions on where to get your fix.
POP-UPS
Penny Tom helps a customer while her son Darryl works at the Sue’s Bites and Delights booth at San Jose’s Japantown Farmers Market on June 14, 2026. (Photo by Grace Hwang Lynch)
Sue’s Bites and Delights: Upcoming pop-ups are announced on Instagram @suesbites and orders are taken on the website suesbites.com, where people can also sign up for the newsletter to get the first announcements. Pickups typically take place at Cake Expressions, 2325 De La Cruz Blvd., Santa Clara. The next sale at the San Jose Japantown Farmers Market will take place on Sunday, Aug. 2.
Honey and Pearl: Guava cakes in individual parfait servings and 6-inch, 8-inch and quarter-sheet cakes, as well as other specialties, can be pre-ordered at honeyandpearl.net. Pickups are generally between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays, 1145 65th St., Emeryville.
BAKERIES
Flower Flour: Individual and 7-inch round guava cakes (both topped with berries) are available in-store. Pruneyard Shopping Center, 1875 S. Bascom Ave. #140, Campbell; flower-flour.com
La Patisserie: Traditional guava cakes with vibrant pink crumb and decorated with piped icing are on the menu, in sizes from cupcakes to full sheet. 19758 Stevens Creek Blvd., Cupertino; lapatisserie.net
Lavender Bakery and Café: The Solano Avenue branch of this bakery specializes in patisserie, while the San Pablo Avenue location specializes in bread. Its guava mousse cake is a more modern rendition with naked sides, available by the slice and in whole cakes ranging in size from 6-inch to full sheet. 1820 Solano Ave., Berkeley; lavenderbakeries.com
Sugar, Butter, Flour: Owned by the same family as La Patisserie and Lavender Bakery and Café, this bakery offers a similar minimalist style guava cake, available in sizes from 6-inch to full sheet. 669 S. Bernardo Ave., Sunnyvale; sugarbutterflour.com