Malted Vanilla Tart

This is a bit of a lazy recipe. I bought some cream cheese a month or two ago with vague ambitions of making danishes, but danishes only stay fresh for a day or two, and I doubt the capacity of my two-person household to consume an entire batch of danishes. I suppose I could be munificent and send the extras into my husband’s lab (as I often do with cookies), but I’m not sure they’d travel. Also, danishes sound like kind of a pain, and lately, I’ve been eschewing complicated, difficult recipes in favor of less convoluted alternatives.

This recipe includes a pastry crust, so it might not fall within most people’s definitions of “easy,” but I cannot emphasize enough the extent to which the art of making a pastry crust can be easily mastered with practice. I don’t even bother using ice water to bind the dough most of the time – I just use cold tap and am careful to be gentle when stirring.

So this isn’t the sort of recipe over which one ought to lose any sleep. However, the truly crust-averse among y0u could consider crushing chocolate graham crackers, adding a bit of butter, and using that for the tart’s bottom layer. I might have done so myself if I ever had graham crackers laying about my pantry.

But ought I bother? you might be thinking to yourself. Is it flavorful, this uncomplicated tart? I think it’s quite lovely. Its texture is somewhere between that of custard and cheesecake, and the flavors are simple, agreeable, and complementary. It’s not the most exciting thing to ever emerge from my oven, but husband and I polished it off with no difficulty. One would be hard-pressed to truly spoil a dessert combining the flavors of vanilla, chocolate, and malt.