Green Tea Buttercream Cupcakes

I love drinking green tea and eating green tea flavoured food.
So I figured, why not make green tea buttercream?
If you can make it into ice cream, you can definitely make it into buttercream.

So, with my trusty matcha, I added it until I got what I wanted. It reminded me of the ice cream with a different texture.

The wonderful thing about matcha is that it's dried so you don't have to worry about the buttercream breaking due to too much liquid.
It's also bitter so you will not make your cream overly sweet. If anything, it'll help balance the cream out to be less sweet because of the bitterness.
Good matcha is also very strong in flavour. So depending on the cream's batch size, you may only need 2 Tbsp of Matcha.
I used around 2 for enough buttercream for 16 cupcakes.
I usually add a little vanilla extract as well to help enhance the flavours. Vanilla might be a little boring on it's own, but it's a wonderful enhancer and usually adds that little touch to your baking.

I've tried this cream on both vanilla and chocolate cupcakes. Both are wonderful with green tea.
People who have never tried green tea flavour food before like the results.
For the Asian people who love eating green tea ice cream, they couldn't stop eating the cupcakes and went back for seconds.
All in all, I believe that means success.
Next step, bake green tea cupcakes and then put the green tea buttercream on top.
Maybe I'll make it even more Asian and add red bean paste in the middle too.

(It looks much greener under bright lights)

Match (Green Tea) Honey Spritz Cookie

 Originally we were going to give 2 bottles of wine per person for wedding favours. One day my hubby had and idea and asked why don't we do cookies and wine. I wasn't too thrill with the idea since we already have all the wine but I figured we can drink it ourselves if we want to.
So I decided to make green tea heart shape cookies since it's a recipe I've done before.

The nice thing about these cookies is that it's freezable so you can make them well ahead of time. The most I've tried freezing these cookies before eating them is 1 month. Since I know 1 month will work great, that's how far ahead I made the cookies.

I saran wrapped pairs of cookies so I can easily put them into the favour bags the day before the wedding.
I got these pretty favour bags on the left from China.

I found filling the gun to be very time consuming. Even more time consuming then it is to make the cookies and squeeze out each cookie. Since I had to make 200 cookies, I had 2 cookie guns going. I would fill while my hubby would squeeze it out.

The heart shape from the Wilson cookie gun isn't as good as you can see from the picture on the left.
It looks a bit weird but the cookie gun is easy to use.

I borrowed the second cookie gun from my friend.
Her's is an Italian brand cookie gun. It's harder to use but the heart shapes turn out a lot better as seen in the picture on the right.

Overall, the product taste good so I cared less about the shape.

Match Honey Spritz Cookie

Ingredients

• 1 Tbsp matcha
• 180g non bleach all purpose flour
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 113.5g butter
• 50g sugar
• 1 egg
• 50g honey
• 1/2 tsp vanilla

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degree F.
2. In a bowl, mix together the matcha, flour, baking powder and salt. 
3. In another bowl, cream the butter until fluffy using a stand mixer or a hand mixer. 
4. Add the sugar, egg and vanilla to the butter and beat until evenly mixed and fluffy.
5. Add the dry mixture to the ingredients and mix until the dry ingredients is just incorporated. The dough should look shaggy and somewhat fluffy.
6. Check if the dough is too wet, if it is, add more flour.
7. Load the dough into the cookie gun and press the dough onto a cold, ungreased cookie sheet.
8. Bake for 8-12 minutes or until the cookies are lightly golden brown around the edges. Remove from heat and onto cooling grid.

Enjoy :)