I was first introduced to matcha several years ago, before my sister got married and had her adorable baby. Back then she was still living with us, and the Starbucks here in town was young. She came home with a green tea Frappuccino and a green tea latte, explaining to me that they had gotten her order wrong so she got the frappuccino free. Loving sister that she is, she let me have it. I was never the same again. Then a few years ago I introduced it to Caroline and it became our go-to Starbucks treat, hot or cold. We became matcha fanatics, plotting our future (and perhaps one day REAL) trip to Japan around how much matcha we could consume.
For those of you who don't know what matcha is, I'll explain. Normally, when you drink tea, you're soaking dried tea leaves in water, and the kind of tea depends on what tea leaves are being used and at what part in their lives they're being harvested. You steep the leaves in the water, and then you remove them. Matcha is made when the leaves are taken and ground up into a fine green powder. This powder is dissolved in water (or milk, which I prefer). So basically, you're actually consuming the leaves. It tastes very different, a little bitter and planty, and apparently it's an acquired taste because my mom isn't quite fond of it.
This past Christmas my mom gave me a packet of Matcha as one of my gifts, and it's been sitting on my desk haunting me for two months. You know that thing you don't get often, but you love? That thing that comes in small amounts because it's expensive, and when it's gone, it's gone? That's what this matcha is for me. But I'm finally done with the rationing. This matcha is being used!
So I went hunting to find a good recipe, and I knew I wanted to make cookies, something simple. I found a few recipes for matcha cream cheese cookies, but I wasn't in love with everything that was going on in the ingredients, mainly because one of them called for 2 freakin' sticks of butter. TWO. I love butter, but I don't want to die after eating one cookie.
So then I came up with the idea of finding a good cream cheese cookie recipe and adapting it to include matcha. The best one I found was on a blog called Kitchen Joy, but she pulled her recipe from another blog, The Girl Creative. I modified the recipe just a little to accommodate the matcha. The recipes that included matcha all called for it to be added with the flour, but matcha is really supposed to be dissolved in your wet ingredients before it's used in baking, so I mixed it with the egg and vanilla before I started.
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| Matcha! Isn't this the most beautiful thing you've ever seen? |
The other thing I modified was the amount of cream cheese. All the recipes I found called for 3 ounces, which was the most perplexing thing to me. I asked my mom about it and she said it was probably because they were buying their cream cheese in the little 3 oz. packages. First, cream cheese is life. Why would you buy only 3 ounces at a time? Second, CREAM CHEESE IS LIFE! WHO SELLS CREAM CHEESE IN 3 OZ. PACKAGES?? In this house we buy cream cheese by the 8 oz. package, and usually several packages at a time. So, to sum up, I cut 8 ounces in half and put four in the cookies. The other half will be the life of my English muffins next week.
Matcha
Cream Cheese Cookies
1
tbsp matcha powder
½
cup butter, room temperature
4
oz. cream cheese, room temperature
1
½ cups powdered sugar
½
tsp baking powder
1
egg, room temperature
½
tsp vanilla
1
¾ cups flour
Combine
egg, vanilla, and matcha in small bowl. Cream butter and cream
cheese in mixer for about 1 minute. Beat in powdered sugar and
baking powder. Add matcha mixture and beat until fluffy. Mix in
flour. Separate dough into two balls and form into 2 inch logs.
Wrap and refrigerate dough for about 1 hour. Preheat oven to 375°.
Slice dough into ¼ inch thick slices and place on cookie sheet.
Bake about 7 minutes, or until bottoms are lightly browned.
The cookies don't look very green in these pictures, but I promise they are. I just didn't feel like going around and hunting better lighting to take the pictures. The recipe I adapted from said it would yield about two dozen, but somehow I got 46 cookies. I don't know what happened there. And while I made them as slice and bake cookies, you can make them as drop cookies as well. They turned out pretty tasty, but next time I might add a little more matcha. Now if only Caroline were here so I could share them.
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