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.