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

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

Laid-back Lille and Bustling Brussels

After a night in a tiny AirBnB in Canterbury , where there were chocolates on the table and artwork on every inch of the walls, we boarded a ferry with an absolute minimum of fuss, enjoyed a smooth crossing of the channel, and were deposited in the decidedly unscenic surroundings of the port of Dunkirk two hours later. Once we got past the cranes and shipping containers, though, the countryside was flat but pleasant. We stopped at a small town called Cassel, reached by cobbled roads winding up a hill. On the summit was an old windmill and a topograph telling you the distances to various improbable places; St Omer may have been visible in the haze, but Manchester was surely over the horizon.  In Lille, we found our apartment, unpacked the luggage (one rucksack apiece), and set out to find food. Our first choice was fully booked, so we embarked on that kind of aimless wandering where everyone is hungry and no one wants to actually choose a restaurant. We reached a Lebanese place call...
Post a Comment
Read more

Birmingham: Temples to many things

Birmingham's cathedral is overshadowed by more modern temples: the mirrored swirls of New Street train station; the dotted bulge of the Selfridges store; the lacy blocks of the library; the pillars and pediments of the museum and art gallery. Museum and town hall Next to all these, Birmingham Cathedral, in its square of dusty grass, isolated from the main flow of shopping and travel, seems less like a dominant building and more like a minor chapel. It turns out the unpretentiousness is deliberate. St Philip's Church was built in 1715 when the worshipping population of Birmingham had outgrown the medieval constraints of St Martin in the Bullring . Birmingham remained part of the Diocese of Worcester until 1905, when Charles Gore pushed for the creation of a new diocese and became its first bishop. Seeing the depth of need in the city, he decided to convert St Philip's to a cathedral rather than spend money on a grand new building. Birmingham Cathedral had to be restored afte...
Post a Comment
Read more