
green tea Chocolate cake recipe
I’ve been having some anxiety about writing this post because I don’t know whether to call it matcha or matcha tea or matcha green tea. Are any of these redundant, or all they all correct? For now I’ll call it matcha, but please correct me if I’m wrong. I totally roll my eyes when people say chai tea, so if I’m going to be all judgy, I better use matcha correctly.
Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s move on to this cake. Sure, you can mix matcha powder and hot water and drink it and it’s great, but I’m pretty sure this stuff was meant to be used for frosting all along. Now that I’ve added matcha powder to swiss buttercream, I can’t imagine it any other way. The flavor is delicate yet earthy and goes so well with dark chocolate. I usually use this recipe for SMBC from Bravetart as my base recipe, but this time, I decided to play around with the ratios a bit. In terms of egg whites/butter/sugar, I usually do 1:1:3, especially if I’m adding something sweet to the frosting like chocolate or caramel sauce. I have also seen other bakers recommend a 1:2:3 ratio, but this time, I a tried 1:1.5:2 ratio. Less butter made the frosting less rich and let the delicate flavor of the green tea come through, and since the matcha isn’t sweet, I added a bit more sugar than I normally do.
The chocolate cake is a hybrid of a few of my favorite cake recipes. I wanted it to be light and less fudgy than my go to chocolate cake, but not lacking in chocolate flavor. After some experimentation and a few fails (and maybe some tears) I decided to go with a butter based chocolate cake. I tend to prefer oil based chocolate cakes because they don’t dry out as fast, but I have a feeling that this cake won’t last long anyway, especially once you slather it in matcha frosting.
Ingredients
- For the Chocolate Cake:
- 2 ounces (60 grams) unsweetened chocolate, chopped
- 3 tablespoons Dutch process cocoa powder
- 2/3 cup (160 ml) boiling water
- 1 cup (125 grams) all purpose flour
- 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 11 tablespoons (155 grams) unsalted butter, softened but still cool
- 1 cup (200 grams) granulated sugar
- 2 large eggs, at room temperature
- 1/2 cup (120 ml) buttermilk
- 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
- For the Matcha Frosting:
- 6 large egg whites (or 170 grams liquid egg whites)
- 1 1/4 cups (250 grams) granuated sugar
- pinch of salt
- 3 sticks (340 grams) unsalted butter, softened but still cool
- 2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
- 1-2 tablespoons matcha powder plus additional for dusting