I brought a couple of bags of matcha green tea powder back from Hong Kong, and I’d been trying to think of something to do with them. Not as easy as you’d think. I don’t have an ice cream maker, green tea creme brulee has been done, and buttercream scares me (both to eat and to make). As for baked goods: I can’t explain what it is in my nature that makes me perfectly happy to sit, as I did today, shelling fava beans, trimming and blanching baby artichokes, and skinning tomatoes for confit, while the thought of sifting a single cup of flour will have me bolting from the kitchen. Tea cakes or financiers, then, were out.

I like my matcha-flavoured things bracingly green, with a long, bitter finish. So I settled on a very matcha cheesecake filling, in a puff pastry crust, topped with cubes of caramel-poached pear. (It was inspired by a scruffy-looking but transcendent turnover–goat cheese and pear–that I bought this week at Park Slope’s Colson Patisserie.) You’ll find that the lightly spicy pear works very well with the cool, bittersweet cream. And you may find that you want another.

This porny-looking dessert is among the easiest you’ll ever see: you won’t have to measure a thing. Easy is relative, of course: If you want easy easy, there is always fruit salad. But if you can wield a knife, open a pack of frozen puff pastry and taste your way through a bowl of green tea cheesecake filling, then you can make this non-recipe. (Don’t get all sanctimonious on me, Martha Stewart. My “counter space” is the top of a stainless steel wheely cart from IKEA. Since I assembled it myself, I know for a fact that during the bashing-butter-into-dough stage of puff pastry fabrication, I would destroy both the dough and the cart.)

Here goes.

Store-bought puff pastry shells (Pepperidge Farm makes some serviceable ones, if you’re in America) are baked off and allowed to cool. Full-fat cream cheese and sour cream (2 parts cream cheese to 1 part sour cream is a good piping consistency) are sweetened with plain sugar and flavoured with matcha green tea powder, to taste. Decide if you want just enough matcha to colour the mixture green, or, as I do, a good, bitter jolt of the stuff. A Ziploc bag with one corner snipped–pastry tip not necessary–serves as an unfussy piping bag for getting the green cream into the now room temperature pastry shells.

A peeled, finely diced pear (under-ripe is best for texture) is caramelized in a simple mixture of sugar and butter. To make the caramel, simply place granulated sugar in a pan over medium heat–no water, no nothing–and wait. As the sugar begins to liquefy, swirl it around the pan. When the sugar is completely dissolved, add small cubes of butter to get a pouring consistency. Add diced pears to the pan, coat completely and allow the caramel to darken. Add more butter if the caramel gets too stiff. And add cardamom if you like it. The caramelized pears should be tender and golden brown but still retain their shape.

Top the green tea-stuffed pastry shells with the cubes of caramelized pear. Chill before serving.

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