Matchanimals

So the other day, by sheer luck, I stumbled upon the elusive matcha green tea. It's kind of like the Parisian holy grail. You hear about delicious recipes, you try lovely cakes in Korean restaurants, friends tell you where you can buy it, but then nada: out of stock. Shop closed down. And I'll admit, more than once I would just forget to look for it once I got to the exciting luxury food shop/Asian supermarket/random tea room. Let's just say I'm easily distracted. So when I spotted a jar at random the other week, I had to have some.

   

Why? Because I needed an excuse to try out my ever-growing collection of woodland cookie cutters (let's play 'spot the unseasonal animal' shall we?). I'd like to thank Ikea, my mother, and my friend Cynthia for contributing this collection.

I found this recipe on Pinterest that looked GOOD and EASY, my two main criteria, and I started mixing things together. I wasn't entirely sure whether my matcha was good quality or not, but I don't like overly sweet cookies so I stuck to the 1/3 cup.

 

The flour/matcha mixture looked so pretty!

But then I added the wet ingredients, and the 'beat until mostly incorporated' step gave me this: 

Moist and bitty flour. Definitely not cookie dough ready to be shaped into anything. Epic Pinterest fail. I double and triple checked the recipe, I even checked Martha's version, and I definitely didn't go wrong anywhere. I think the quantities must be off. So no, I wouldn't recommend this recipe. Unless you have a talented Boyfriend who knows how to come to the rescue when you mess up in the kitchen (so pretty much every time I enter the kitchen - I'm not even going to tell you about the Hummus I made the other day).

So by adding more butter and more sugar, we ended up with this. Actual dough-shaped dough. I stuck it in the fridge while we went shopping and when we got back I rolled it out and made these:

Some of them got salt on and some didn't. I wasn't really feeling the cookies anymore at this point and had decided they were going to be horrible, but Boyfriend would have mocked me if he'd known there was fleur de sel involved (he's a bit of a French cooking purist and never mixes strange ingredients together. I once made avocado pasta and he STILL thinks I just made it up, not believing it was a real recipe I found on Pinterest, even though we all know Pinterest is the most reliable source of weird recipes on the interwebs, right?).

So anyway, I cooked them. They came out. A couple of tails and ears were burned, but other than that they were sort of ok. A bit sweet for my tast. Not delicious, and I don't think they tasted the way they should have, but they were edible. I even had positive feedback from a friend who has lived in Japan SO HE MUST KNOW.

So there you have it. I'm pretty sure it's possible to bake delicious matcha cookies. Just don't use this recipe.