matcha-matcha-matcha-me

what did i do in summer 2021?

other than the obvious (going to work & hiding away at home when i wasn’t at work), as you can see from my previous blogposts, i sewed and baked and cooked. while the pandemic was going out strong and we did not have vaccines yet, one of the few ways to entertain myself and my palate was to make our own food.

and because there weren’t (still aren’t) many places that offer matcha food/beverages in Finland, of course i had to crave for matcha flavour. 😋 good thing that the trusted tea shop i always got my matcha powder from was–and is–still around!

i wasn’t too picky about what exactly i would make. the usual ‘sponge cake’ go-to recipe was enough for me, i thought while i ordered the matcha powder. and, i was thinking of making the matcha souffle for my birthday.

but then, while waiting for the powder to arrive, i remembered another thing i missed: carrot cakes!

to be honest, what i missed was not the carrot cake itself, but rather the topping, or icing as some might say. in Finland, most of the icing is made of cream cheese, which i find is the BEST icing!

so i tried to look for recipes for cream cheese icing… that can be put on top of matcha sponge cake. as luck would have it, i found the perfect one, as the icing itself also uses matcha powder!

when the matcha powder finally came, i went to work right away!

first, i made the ‘sponge cake’ into smaller cupcake sizes, and i did this the same way as i did many times before: changing the baking soda into baking powder and adjusted the other ingredients according to that change. but somehow this time the outcome made my ‘sponge cake’ a lot more dry and they cracked on the top, as you can see from the picture.

well, but who cares. i had a secret weapon now: matcha icing!!

now they were crack-ey no more! 😂

so here’s what i put into the icing: 100 gr cream cheese (non-flavoured), 50 gr butter, 300 ml icing sugar, 1 teaspoon of matcha powder. whip them all up and store it in the fridge to keep it cool & firm.

so what about the taste?

one bite, and i thought i was going to heaven.

i’m not kidding. if you’re a matcha lover like me, i warmly recommend you to try this combo!

the matcha powder was enough for me to make many more batches of these (the souffle idea went out the window), and i finally did buy baking soda + yoghurt to try the sponge cake recipe the ‘right way’. the result was much fluffier and much spongier cupcakes, and it made so many more cupcakes than when i used the baking powder, i had to only use 2/3 of the whole dough!

unfortunately i did not take any pictures of the fluffier version, but let me assure you that no matter what version you decide to make, these matcha cupcakes are sure to satisfy your matcha cravings!

go green (tea)

now that we still had the mini amount of green tea powder left, there was this one more recipe i had been dying to try out.

i was actually looking for a green tea brownie recipe some time ago when i came across this recipe instead: Green Tea Chocolate (or Truffles) by Just One Cookbook. after seeing the options of white baking chocolate available here, i decided to try it using Fazer white baking chocolate.

with the incident of the bitter soufflé still fresh in my mind, i tried making the first batch of these truffles with only 1 tablespoon of matcha powder. and the result was too sweet!

it was more of a white chocolate with a tiny hint of matcha than matcha truffles. which is of course not a problem for white chocolate lover, but… i want my matcha! 😀

another mistake i made was to only let the batch cool down in the fridge for 4 hours. it was way too soft & sticky to cut into nice looking blocks, hence the terrible looking shapes.

so of course i had to make a second try. this time i used all what’s left of our precious matcha powder… two tablespoons for the mixture + last sprinkles for the topping.

this time around, i left the batch cool down in the fridge overnight and a few more hours (about 19 hours in total). by the time i took it out, it was harder than my first batch, but still quite sticky & hard to cut. maybe i just don’t have good enough knife, i don’t know. but these blocks are okay. and look how much one batch made! (that is: all that you see in the above picture plus 11 more blocks already on our plates since they couldn’t fit to these boxes anymore.)

the colour certainly looked more promising than my first batch, and when we ate them, they were more bitter (in a very good way) than the first. we could definitely taste more matcha now. but, i still have to say it’s more white chocolate-y than matcha. i’m guessing the problem lies in the white chocolate i used, but it’s really hard to tell since there isn’t any other comparison (so far) and i doubt i can find better options here.

the good thing is that since they’re quite sweet, it’s enough to eat 5-6 blocks whenever i crave for it.

i brought some of the first batch to my work place, and at least my co-workers liked them (because they like white chocolate, LOL). maybe one day, if i get another craving and can find better white chocolates AND have enough matcha powder, i can try this recipe again. for now, i’m gonna indulge in these truffles for a few days! ❤

and while we’re still on the green (tea) topic, let me say for the record that i have also tried the soufflé recipe for the second time… with less matcha powder!

i also put the butter inside the bowls more generously than the first time, and look how my soufflé grew in the oven!

next time, i need to remember to put them on the lowest shelf in the oven, because when i put them in the middle shelf, they always got a bit burned on the top. but that is not something the sprinkles of icing sugar cannot fix!

and after the first bite… i was in heaven. it was truly perfect this time, and just super delicious! i love, love, LOVE it! ❤

thank heavens for matcha & matcha recipes around the internet! 😉

soufflé, s’il vous plaît

being a matcha lover in Finland is hard. not because you can’t get matcha products, but they’re still quite rare here as there is no big matcha trend like in Asia. this means that while there are stores here that sells matcha products, the prices are almost always quite expensive. one store sells a matcha mini kit kat pack of 12 for about 7.50€, another sells the regular matcha pocky for 4€. well, you get the idea.

and the matcha powder that i usually use for baking? it costs about 18-22€ for a 30 grams pack. that’s a lot of money for a small amount of powder, in my opinion. and in my dictionary, that means every recipe made out of it has to be successful, there’s no margin for error! so we passed 2016 without baking any matcha things (thankfully last year we went to Indonesia and Singapore. oooh, the matcha galore!).

but now when i saw this recipe from The Tummy Train, i couldn’t help it anymore. we decided to go and get the matcha powder, and even the soufflé bowls since we didn’t have any. and let me remind you before we go forward that i am a true novice in baking, and have never in my life made anything even near a soufflé!

the pressure was now on, but as i usually am in sewing, in baking i’m also so determined to not let anything go to waste. i did everything by the recipe, and things were going great until i had to make the meringue. it refused to be stiff and i was almost ready to give up until my husband found out from the internet that the problem could have been when i was separating the yolk and the egg whites. that’s what it clicked that i did accidentally let some of the yolks into the egg whites, thinking it wouldn’t really matter! well what do you know, little things DO matter in this recipe! thankfully i had extra eggs so i started making the meringue from the beginning again, this time really making sure that none of the yolk went into the egg whites. it worked like a charm! i had no idea making a meringue can be so fun! 😀

so then it was time to put the mixture into the bowls… and found out that our bowls are probably a lot bigger than the ones used in the recipe. i used 11 cm (in diameter) wide & 6 cm deep bowl, and guess how many bowls this recipe filled? T W O. all those work for 2 bowls of soufflé!

ah well, the show must go on. this was after all only my first time of making a soufflé, so i kept my cool and put them into the oven anyway.

fresh from the oven!

when they came out… they looked pretty! okay, maybe the right one was slightly burned, but whatever! (fyi, it was about 10 pm when i finished making this, so anything goes!)

a sprinkle of icing sugar to make them look prettier

soon it was time for the truth: the texture & taste!

the texture looked correct (yay!), so i dove straight in. it was good! but, of course i found another mistake. since there was no telling what kind of matcha powder used in the original recipe, and no telling how strong or faint the powder i’m using for this recipe, i ended up using 2 tablespoons of the powder (which is like the maximum in the recipe). it turned out to be too much! next time i’m going to only put 1 tablespoon, because otherwise the soufflé is going to be too bitter. and for the record, i always use Kabuse matcha powder no. 1 for baking.

but nonetheless, since the texture of the soufflé itself is so airy and light, we finished them in no time, bittersweet and all.

the end verdict is that this was a nice change from our usual green tea muffins, but considering all the work, it’s best to be ‘saved’ for more special occasions. but hey… i made my very first soufflé! yippie!

green, not with envy

couldn’t help noticing the repetitive colour scheme in our house lately: green, combined with a hint of pink.

the top pic is an IKEA fabric that’s been in use in our house for around 4 years. second pic is my towel, bought at Hemtex. the bottom pic is our newest fave home-made dessert: green tea/matcha sponge cake + matcha ice cream.

yep, i’ve been baking again, and this one was quite successful that i’m about to make another batch right now. 🙂 the matcha ice cream was made by my husband.

i got the recipe for the sponge cake here. since i don’t have baking soda lying around the house, after trying to find out about it from the internet i finally decided to replace the baking soda by baking powder. despite the fact that people around the world seem to think that they can not replace one another, but it turned out okay for me, because by putting in baking powder instead of baking soda all i had to do was to triple the amount and take out the acidic ingredient, which in this case was the yoghurt. so baking soda = (3 x baking powder) – acidic ingredient. something like that. :p

the only minor unsuccessful thing was again the slightly burnt surface of the cake (it’s supposed to be all green, mine was brownish from the top). but the taste was heaven. it was so good that my husband couldn’t stop eating them. (well, neither could i.) and the good thing is that since it uses no yeast at all, i don’t even have any tummy problem after eating this delicious cake! now i just need to practice more to get the feel of exactly how long i should let the dough be in the oven, since i seem to always let them stay there for a bit too long.

yep, we’ve certainly been a bit green lately. greenful of matcha, not with envy. 🙂