I saw the picture for this recipe and was very impressed by the look of these sugar cookies. I then looked into this ‘matcha’ stuff. The recipe calls for a couple of tablespoons… which if you buy from Holland & Barrett will cost about £15 – screw that!

Not that H&B is charging more than anyone else, it’s jus that they love to sell all sorts of health fads and other nonsense at enormous cost. Homeopathic weight loss with antineoplastin pro-organic ionized water that’s gluten free?… yeah they’ll sell you that shit for £125 per gram… But to be fair, if you just want some nuts, dried fruit or low-cal liquorice, they have that: you just need to educate yourself before visiting.

Anyway, instead this matcha, I’m just grinding up some green tea bags in the spice grinder. And instead of the sugar cookie recipe I’m going with Cook’s Illustrated Cook Book’s Sablé recipe (636).

So: sablés. You might think a French recipe would be called for… but I’m addicted to America’s Test Kitchen, so I’m using their recipe :)

The thing is, ATK is great for how to make things at home that taste like ‘the real thing’. And they come up with all sorts of interesting techniques in the process. In this case it’s using a hard boiled egg yolk: and not only that they have their own special ay of hard boiling!

So: you put an egg in a pan of cold water and bring to the boil. As soon as it starts to boil you turn off the heat and cover it, and leave for 10 minutes. You then plunge it into a bowl of ice-water for 5 minutes, before peeling both the shell and white off it.

Then you force it through a sieve, which while you’re doing it looks like it might take a few weeks of soaking to clean the sieve, but turns out to be that bad.

The result is rather strange looking, a bit like finely grated parmesan!

After all this grinding of green tea and sieving egg yolks, it’s onto normal biscuit baking: cream the butter, sugar, salt & egg yolk, then mix in the flour and green tea powder. Unfortunately I forgot to add the green tea powder with the flour, so had to add it afterwards, which took some time to combine, so it probably got over processed.

Once combined, it’ gets rolled out into 2 x 15cm cylinders, which get wrapped in baking parchment and popped in the freezer for 45 minutes to firm up. To avoid the bottoms getting flattened I put then in split kitchen roll tubes.

 

Then they get sliced into 7mm discs, brushed with egg white, and sprinkled with demerara sugar.

Then it’s into a 160c fan oven for 16 minutes, swapping over half way through. Unfortunately I mis-read tbsp vs tsp AGAIN and I have far too much sugar on top… and then my phone crashed during the second baking session, so I had to guess when they were done!

 

The excess sugar hadn’t melted properly, but the edges seemed just browned, and after they cooled they were nice and crispy without being over done. They tasted mainly of butter and sugar, with the green tea only being a very subtle undertone. So they taste great… due to butter and sugar.