Bringing Cajeta Brownie Tart Bringing

This brownie dessert with cream cheese and cajeta swirls is simple to make, shareable, and has the ideal ratio of sweet to sour.

Some people prepare their grandma’s well-known cowboy cookies or the endearingly antiquated chocolate roll cake their family has been cooking for decades when tasked with making dessert for a dinner gathering. The fluted tart pan, however, is what I reach for when I’m in charge of the final dish, and I begin melting chocolate and coffee for a Cajeta Cream Cheese Brownie Tart.

In 2020, when blogger and author Esteban Castillo released his debut cookbook, Chicano Eats, I first fell in love with this dish. The book is filled with sophisticated dessert dishes inspired by the nostalgic candy Castillo grew up consuming, along with instructions for papa tacos and chorizo squash tortas. Duvalin, a strawberry, hazelnut, and vanilla-flavored Mexican candy, served as the inspiration for a tricolor Jell-O mold.

Cajeta, which is similar to dulce de leche but made with goat’s milk, has a tangy edge that’s hard to find in other caramels. The caramel has inspired Hershey candy bars and flavors of champurrado, but when mixed with tangy cream cheese, its fruity, ripe quality shines even more.

Castillo celebrates that tangy combination by rippling a cajeta-sweetened cream cheese mixture through a batch of fudgy chocolate brownies. An egg added to the cream cheese component keeps the swirls buoyant and fluffy after they’re baked. Since the brownie base starts with a combination of coffee and chocolate (he opts for Abuelita tablets, but I’ll admit to sometimes using semisweet chocolate chips out of convenience), the brownies are satisfyingly bitter and robust—an ideal foil for the bright cream cheese swirls. If your past attempts at marbled cheesecakes have turned out muddy and messy for all your effort, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by Castillo’s technique here, which involves sandwiching the cream cheese between layers of brownie batter before using a skewer to swirl with a light touch.

My favorite part of this recipe is the fact that it’s basically a cake with the icing baked into it. No need to bake and cool layers, whip together an elaborate topping, and then decorate—this tart comes out of the oven ready to set straight on a decorative cake stand (or carry a few blocks to your friend’s house while it cools en route).