Matcha Green Tea Sugar Cookies

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

These might not be the right cultural reference, but they're green and they're tasty. I was inspired by a Bon Appétit recipe, but when that particular recipe resulted in cookies that were more like tea cakes, I searched for a great rolled sugar cookie recipe that could be appropriately modified with matcha green tea powder. The chopped white chocolate and candied ginger are optional but add some depth in flavor.

Here is the approximate recipe:

Matcha Green Tea Sugar Cookies

Makes about 40 ~two-inch cookies

Ingredients:

• ¾ cup (170g) unsalted butter (room temperature)
• ½ cup (100g) granulated sugar
• ¼ cup (50g) brown sugar
• 1 large egg
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• ¼ tsp almond extract
• 2¼ cups (281g) all-purpose flour
• 2 Tbsp matcha green tea powder
• ½ tsp baking powder
• 85g white chocolate, chopped
• candied ginger, chopped (to taste)

for sugar coating:

• ½ tsp matcha green tea powder
• ½ cup (100g) granulated sugar

Directions:

1. Whisk together the ½ cup of sugar and ½ tsp matcha in a small bowl and set aside.
2. Whisk together the flour, 2 Tbsp matcha and baking powder in a medium bowl and set aside.
3. Using a stand mixer, beat the butter until creamed. Add sugar and continuing beating until light and fluffy, scraping bowl as needed. Add egg and both extracts and continue beating until fully combined.
4. Add half of flour mixture and beat until just barely combined. Add remainder and continue mixing until just combined.
5. Fold in white chocolate and candied ginger.
6. Flatten and wrap dough in plastic wrap, and chill for at least 1 hour.
7. Roll out dough to ¼" thickness. Cut into desired shapes.
8. Bake at 350 degrees for 8-10 minutes until just lightly colored around edges.
9. While still warm, toss cookies in matcha sugar mixture and set on cooling rack.

Birthday | Purple Princess Cake

It's not every day that someone requests a princess cake, or even knows what that is! I love fun opportunities like that. A friend wanted to surprise a birthday girl with a princess cake. The only real guidelines were that she likes purple, and her nickname is "Panda".

A princess cake (prinsesstårta in Swedish) is a traditional Swedish cake made of layers of sponge cake, pastry cream, and jam (I think typically raspberry), and shaped into a dome with whipped cream. The dome is then covered by marzipan, traditionally tinted a light green color and decorated with marzipan flowers. In this case, I tinted the marzipan purple, and topped with purple marzipan flowers.

To assemble this, I first stacked the cake, jam and pastry cream layers. Then I spread whipped cream (stiffened with a little bit of pastry cream) into a bowl. Then I placed the bowl over the cake, inverted, and let it set up in the freezer.

Once frozen, the cake wasn't too difficult to pop out of the bowl mold. I smoothed out the whipped cream dome and then covered with marzipan. Not my smoothest cake covering job, but whipped cream is a little trickier to mold around than say buttercream.

Et voilà!

Wedding Preview | Malibu Romance

A couple weekends ago, I soft-launched the new Milo's Bonbons logo when I catered a wedding in Malibu. I'm excited to share what I made and describe that adventure in more detail, but I may need to wait for professional photographs, as I didn't have much time (or lighting) to capture many good ones myself. In the meantime, here's a quick preview of the wafer paper flowers I made for the wedding cake:

Wafer paper is made of potato starch, and with edible ink, you can print pretty much any color you want. I printed out shades of coral and pink to try to match the bride's bouquet, and then cut out petals to assemble together with piping gel. It takes a little time, but it's a little cleaner and quicker than gumpaste flowers. I also love the soft, romantic feel that wafer paper lends itself to. Can't wait to keep exploring this technique!

More detailed post on the wedding to come!