Home of the Happy Bears: happy weekend bakes

the best thing about having a break so far is that time is pretty much in my hands. and this gives me alot more time to bake for people etc. on last saturday, i decided to make some breakfast treats for my friends and after cracking my head abit, i decided on egg tarts!

truth be told, i hate making sweet shortcrust pastry because they are so difficult to make! without a proper kitchen scale, the quantities of flour, sugar and butter used can be inaccurate and this leads to pastry that is either too tough, too sweet or too oily! and oh my, the time taken to make the pastry from scratch and blind bake them before baking them again with the egg custard is enough to drive me crazy! hahaha...

but then again, egg tarts are a rare treat for most people and since i have the time, why not?

the flies seem to be attracted to my bakes and i have to always keep a watchful eye for them after baking. in the end, i brought a total of 21 egg tarts upstairs to my room whilst they were cooling. or else i'll be in trouble when someone comes complaining to me about a tummyache!!!

mmm...my room smelt heavenly after that! although i do have to admit that my egg tarts look quite ugly and un-pro. but thankfully, everyone liked the egg tarts:)

recipe can be found from previous post. it's not my recipe but from cher in http://thebakerwhocooks.blogspot.com/. but i tweaked the ingredients abit and added more vanilla essence, more eggs and used light cream instead of evaporated milk for one batch of my egg tarts.

whilst meddling with my egg tarts, i tried to make my own unique blend of matcha powder.

as most of my friends know, i am a hopeless addict to all matcha products. but baking green tea powder is difficult to find here so what i did was to blend green tea leaves, icing sugar and milk powder together and hey! something quite original came out from it! can't remember the proportions though because i did everything by taste and smell:)

after making the matcha powder, i wanted to make some matcha cupcakes as well even though i have no recipes for that at all. so i fiddled around with things a bit and ended up with matcha cookies instead! that was a bit of a sweet surprise to me because i was expecting to throw the batter away...here's my trial and error recipe for you to try out if you are a green-tea fan like me:

EASY GREEN TEA COOKIES

Ingredients: 100g softened butter, 1/4 cup caster sugar, 1 tsp vanilla essence, 1 egg, 2 tsp baking powder, approx 1 cup AP flour (sifted), 1 TB matcha powder (or 1.5 TB for stronger flavour but not too much cos i think it will give the cookie a bitter taste)

some sugar for dusting

Steps:
1) Preheat oven to 160 degree celcius (if u want a softer cookie) or 180 degree celcius (if you want a crispier cookie)

2) Cream softened butter and sugar with electric mixer. Add in beaten egg and vanilla essence and mix well till well combined.

3) Sift flour and baking powder and matcha powder together. slowly stir in flour misture into creamed butter and sugar mixture. (caution: flour quantity given may not be accurate as i did it based on judgement of sight)

4) you'll end up with some sticky, googey mass that should still be solid enough for u to spoon out.

5) spoon out one rounded teaspoon of that final mixture and roll it in sugar (more if u have a sweet tooth and like a crunchier taste to yr cookie). place the cookie dough/ ball thingy on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.

6) Bake for 10 to 15 minutes till cookie is light brown and solid to touch.