green tea cookies

If I had to pinpoint my favourite baking ingredient, it would be none other than green tea powder (also known as matcha). It actually took a bit of trial and error before I got to know how to use the powder properly. I started buying what must've been a sugared green tea powder drink thinking it was right for baking (it wasn't, it barely has any flavour) and then finally came across the 50g tin cans of matcha (which is the right thing for baking being so green in colour but also rather expensive), but I started off using the powder ever so sparingly that my cakes would look hardly look even green, let alone taste like green tea.

Then I went to baking school and learnt that recipes which use weight measurements e.g. in grams and litres are much more accurate than your teaspoonfuls and tablespoonfuls and that explained a lot. A lot of the green tea recipes I was using asked for levelled teaspoons and similar measurements and simply, there just wasn't enough green tea to give the recipe flavour. As a guide, I wouldn't use any less than 5g of green tea powder if you are after the green tea flavouring in a baked good.

These green tea cookies are packed with flavour. The recipe is from Keiko Ishida's 'Okashi' which also has a recipe for green tea sable cookies (which I've previously posted about) - personally I think the sable version is nicer, this one is very crumbly in texture and doesn't keep as well (best eaten the day it's made). Preheat oven to 150 degrees. In a large bowl, sift together 100g plain flour, 1/2 tsp baking powder, 5g freen tea powder and 50g ground almonds. Add to the mix 15g rice syrup, 45g maple syrup, a pinch of sea salt and 25g grapeseed oil. Fold together until combined (it will be quite crumbly even at this stage).

Don't ask me what I was thinking. I individually rolled each cookie by hand when I could've just as easily rolled it into a log, chilled it for a bit and then slice much quicker, but I didn't.

Bake cookies for 15-20 minutes on a lined baking tray, then remove from heat and leave to cool on a wire rack.

FYI: I decorated my cookies by stabbing them in a criss cross manner with a fork just before they went into the oven to bake. Completely unnecessary and personally I don't think the hole marks look as a great on a round cookie as they do on square cookies (which is featured in the book).

These were made for the catering do I did a couple of weekends back. I'm curious if there was anyone at the catering do who ate my previous green tea cookies and also these ones, if you read this blog, please leave me a comment and let me know what you think!