Skip to main content

Matcha Green Tea Cake Mix

Some blogs are full of posts which start: Recently, *big company* sent me three pairs of expensive shoes / five bars of delicious chocolate / a free holiday ...

This is not one of those blogs.

But, recently, a company so small I'm not sure it really exists yet sent me a free cake mix, on the condition that I filled in a survey about it and took a few photos.  Blogging about it was not a condition, but just in case the owner makes it to the big time, you heard it here first!


So the Hope Makes It Easy Matcha Cake Mix popped through my letterbox on my birthday (good timing to start) and the rather pretty package sat on my counter for a few days until I'd assembled the ingredients.  Most cake mixes require a few extra ingredients, but this one needed milk, eggs and butter, plus cream and possibly white chocolate for the icing.  Not exactly all-inclusive.  On the plus side, it helpfully provided a cute origami cup for measuring the milk, a line to show you how much butter to cut off, and baking paper circles for your cake tins.


The instructions looked a little complicated, but were easy enough to follow once you got going.  My little helper broke the eggs and mixed them with the milk for me while I melted butter, then we just had to tip in the bright green matcha tea powder and the sachet of dry ingredients and whisk it all up for a few minutes.  Despite the weird colour, it did smell delicious.



Being an inveterate recipe tweaker, I baked the cake in a rectangular pan instead of sandwich tins, then iced half with buttercream because I knew my family wouldn't eat the recommended whipped cream topping.  I forced a group of friends to be guinea pigs, and after they'd got over the shock of eating a cake that looked like spinach, they all agreed it was very nice.  The only problem was that the sweet icing overwhelmed the delicate flavour of the cake.


For the other half of the cake I tried out the whipped white chocolate ganache from the instructions.  Oh, that stuff was good.  A few spoonfuls may have gone astray between the bowl and the cake.  It still had a tendency to mask the green tea flavour, but the creaminess worked well with the light, fine-textured cake.

I wouldn't usually bother with cake mixes, but it was interesting to try a new ingredient - I never would have gone out and bought matcha green tea - and I was impressed with the quality of the finished product.  So many extra ingredients are needed, though, that you would probably wouldn't pick this up if you didn't already bake, in which case you would be likely to already have a measuring jug and scales.  This suggests it might be worth thinking a bit more about the target customer.

So thanks, Hope Makes It Easy, for the birthday present!  It was fun to try and delicious to eat.  And I will definitely be remembering that white chocolate icing.
Labels:

Comments

Tina said…
Ever since I started using leaf green tea, I helps me to stay refreshed at my work place and have lost few inches at well. Interestingly, my girlfriend is impressed with change in my personality and tried to find out the secret.
6 March 2017 at 10:38
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Erewash Valley Trail: Ilkeston

You could spend a lot of time following old canals and railways in the Erewash Valley. This walk included parts of the Erewash Canal, the Nottingham Canal, the Nutbrook Canal, and the Stanton branch line, and I could have continued further along any one of those, if I'd had the time. I started in Kirk Hallam, which is mostly a post-war housing estate with a distinctive outline on the map: the main road to Ilkeston through the middle, and a loop road encircling the village. It looks like the London Underground logo. I parked at the lake at the top of the loop. There was a sculpture commemorating the nearby Stanton Ironworks - the ground remembers the roar of the blast  read the inscription around the base - and the remains of a lock on the Nutbrook Canal. Heading towards Ilkeston, I crossed a former golf course, now a nature reserve called Pewit Coronation Meadows, passed a large sports centre, and was soon in the town centre. There was a general impression of red-brickiness, with l...
Post a Comment
Read more

Mr White Watson of Bakewell

Once upon a time, back in 1795 or so, lived a man who was always asking questions.  The kind of questions like, "Why is glass transparent?" or "Why do fruit trees grow better in that place than in this place?" or "What does the earth look like underneath the surface?"  This last question was one that he was particularly interested in, and he went so far as to work out what the rock layers looked like where he lived, and draw little pictures of them.  Now he was a marble sculptor by trade (as well as fossil hunter, mineral seller, and a few other things) so he thought it would be even better to make his little pictures in stone.  That way he could represent the layers using the actual rocks they were composed of.  Over the course of his lifetime he made almost 100 of these tablets, as he called them. Then he died.  And no one else was quite as interested in all those rocks and minerals as he was.  His collection was sold off, bit by bit, and the table...
Post a Comment
Read more

National Forest Way: Bagworth and Thornton Reservoir

I'd hoped to be further along with my walking by now, but a combination of illness, bad weather, and inset days meant that I couldn't get out for a few weeks. At the first sign of a break in the clouds, I was ready to go. It had rained heavily the day before, and there was still a watery feel to the air. I parked at Thornton Reservoir and donned waterproof trousers and wellies, then started by following a footpath along the back of some houses in Thornton. The village is perched on a ridge, which slopes down to the reservoir on one side, and Bagworth Heath woods on the other. view to Bagworth Heath woods I picked up the Leicestershire Round opposite the village school, and followed it past an old mill, across a railway line, and through the woods. One section of the path was particularly squelchy. At the end of the woods, the footpath sign pointed right, which I assumed meant I should follow the road. It wasn't until afterwards that I realised I could have crossed over and ...
1 comment
Read more