Baked Sunday Mornings: Malted Crisp Tart

This week's recipe for Baked Sunday Mornings is a maltravaganza!  The Malted Crisp Tart is a brown sugar-malt crust topped with milk chocolate-malt ganache, crushed malt balls and caramelized Rice Krispies, malted diplomat cream, and more malt balls and caramelized Rice Krispies as garnish.  If you like malted milk, this tart is for you!

As the recipe points out, making this tart is time-consuming but not difficult.  It only take about 15 seconds to mix together the tart crust -- you put flour, salt, malted milk powder, cold butter, brown sugar, and vanilla into a food processor and pulse until combined.  The resulting mixture is bone dry, so it required a bit of effort to press it into the greased tart pan.  You freeze the tart shell and then bake it until golden brown. 

The next layer in the tart is a ganache made from milk chocolate, malted milk powder, and heavy cream.  After you pour the ganache into the baked and cooled tart shell, you sprinkle on crushed malt balls (I just put some Whoppers into a Ziploc bag and bashed them with a rolling pin -- much faster than chopping) and caramelized krispies, and press them into the ganache.

The caramelized crispies were my favorite part of of this recipe.  To make them, you just put sugar and water in a pan, bring the mixture to a boil, and then add Rice Krispies and stir.  When you first add the cereal, you get a wet mixture of sugar syrup and cereal, but the recipe instructs you to keep stirring until the mixture is dry.  You have to keep stirring until the sugar caramelizes and the pan starts to smoke.  My cereal dried out quickly, but then nothing happened for a very long time.  I kept stirring the dry cereal around the pan wondering when something was going to happen, fully expecting the pan to combust at any moment since the recipe indicates that it will start smoking.  I never got any smoke, but after 25 minutes, the sugar finally caramelized and I was able to coat all of the cereal in the caramel and pour it out onto a Silpat to cool.  The caramelized crispies are crazy delicious.  The sugar coating is sweet, to be sure, but it also makes the Rice Krispies unbelievably crunchy.  They are quite addictive and I really wanted to eat them all.  Caramelizing the cereal completely transforms it, as you can see in the picture below, which shows the caramelized version on the left and plain Rice Krispies on the right.

 

The diplomat cream is a malted pastry cream (whole milk, sugar, egg, egg yolk, cornstarch, malted milk powder, butter, and vanilla) that is cooked until it's thickened, sieved, and chilled, with whipped heavy cream folded in after it's cold.  You spread the diplomat cream over the layer of crushed malt balls and caramelized crispies, and then garnish with whole malt balls and more caramelized crispies.  The tart needs a little more time in the fridge before it sets up and is ready to serve.

I thought this tart was extraordinary, and it's one of my favorite items from Baked Explorations so far.  The brown sugar crust is crisp and delicious, with a rich and complex caramel-like flavor.  In fact, several people who ate this tart asked me if there was a layer of caramel in it.  The crunch of the malt balls and caramelized crispies is a wonderful contrast to the smooth diplomat cream, and while there is an awful lot going on in this tart, all of the flavors and textures combine to make something that is fun, interesting, and very special.  Check out what the rest of Baked Sunday Morning bakers have to say about this tart, here. 

Recipe: "Malted Crisp Tart" from Baked Explorations: Classic American Desserts Reinvented, by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito.