I tasted matcha tea in Japan. It’s a finely ground high-quality green tea with smoky flavours. Japanese tea ceremony is about matcha. But it is now also used to flavour and dye a lot of preparations: pastries, candies and chocolates, ice cream, noodles and drinks.
I decided to use it myself in a shorbread cookie recipe. It gives a lovely green color to the cookies, perfect for Christmas in pine tree shapes, and the taste is so uncommon to surprise your guests!
As I had a half-cup left of ground hazelnut, I added it to my preparation instead of ground almonds. And it gives the perfect balance to the bitterness of matcha.
Prep: 15 minutes
Fridge: 1 hour 30 minutes
Baking: 10 minutes
Makes 20 to 30 cookies
- 3/4 cup flour
- 1/3 cup cold butter
- 1 pinch of salt
- 1/2 cup icing sugar
- 1/2 cup ground hazelnut
- 1/2 egg
- 2 tsp matcha powder
In a big bowl, put the flour and butter cut into small cubes, and crumble with your fingers into the flour, until there’s no more butter and you get like a wet sand mixture.
Add salt, sifted icing sugar, ground hazelnut, matcha powder and mix.
Add half of a beaten egg and squash the dough with your palm against the table until it’s perfectly mixed.
Make a ball and roll the dough out between two baking sheets with a rolling pin, until 0.2 inches thick.
Put on a tray and let rest in the fridge at least one hour or overnight is even better.
With a cookie cutter, cut the dough to form the cookies and put them on a baking sheet.
Put them back in the fridge for at least 30 minutes before baking.
Preheat the oven to 350°F.
Bake for 5 to 10 minutes according to the size of the cookies.
Meanwhile, spread the rest of the dough between two sheets again, et put back in the fridge for the second batch.
