Green Tea Cake with Lemon Honey Buttercream

I should really be studying for my spanish final and finishing my final paper for cultural geography... but I think I'm gonna procrastinate and do this instead.

Green tea cake with lemon honey buttercream

I'm honestly surprised with how this cake turned out. It was quite a challenge putting it all together, especially since I've only done a layered cake once! But my friend Michelle showed me this recipe from Building Buttercream while we were looking up cake recipes for our friend Kerri's surprise birthday party (check out her blog here). It's a green tea layered cake with a lemon honey buttercream. I love green tea! So, naturally, I had to try it.

I made some changes from the original recipe from Building Buttercream, but it still tasted great and I'm definitely keeping this recipe. I think next time I'll try making cupcakes... we'll see how that goes. But it turned out to be a great birthday cake last night and (from what I've heard) everyone loved it! 

Kerri's birthday cake!

So instead of using the Italian Meringue Buttercream in Building Buttercream's recipe, I decided to go the easy route and just use regular butter cream :)

...

Okay, that's a lie. I really did try to make the Italian Meringue Buttercream - but it was a total fail. I'm not gonna go into details about what happened. But, let's just say that stubborn form of frosting ruined my afternoon, splattered all over me and Michelle, didn't work out, and it was really sad.

Really ****in' sad. 

ow ow!

I had a feeling things were gonna get messy... 

After the Italian Meringue Kitchen Massacre, Michelle eventually put an apron on. 

Making frosting is never a clean and simple task.

One day though, one day, I'm gonna get it right next time and it will be awesome. You'll know when that day comes because I will publish a very happy and exciting post.

On another note, aside from using regular buttercream, I made a mint-sea foam ombre for the frosting and adjusted some of the ingredient measurements.

I seriously love mint and sea-foam green

For this recipe I basically doubled all of the measurements because I wanted to make a bigger cake than what Building Buttercream's recipe made. Even after doubling the recipe, I still had to make two whole batches at separate times because I only had 2 cake pans and I wanted 4 layers for the cake.
But I aside from doubling the recipe, I used a little more matcha because I wanted a stronger green tea taste. And since the flavor of lemon stands out, I didn't want it to over power the taste of the cake. So I used zest from about 1/2 of a lemon for the icing between cake layers and the rest of the icing I used was plain buttercream frosting for the crumb coating and creating the mint-sea foam ombre.

Sifted flours, matcha, salt, and baking powder

It's a pretty simple recipe:

Preheat the oven, grease and flour the cake pans, sift the dry ingredients together (all-purpose flour, cake flour, green tea matcha, salt, and baking powder); set them aside.

In a large bowl, beat together the eggs and oil. Add the sugar gradually, beat until smooth, and stir in the vanilla.

Once that's all combined, beat in the flour and yogurt - alternately. I used a 1/4 cup of flour mixture for every scoop of yogurt I added while beating them together. After all of that is mixed, smooth, and has a ribbon-like-consistency, pour them into the prepared cake pans.

It takes about 20-30 minutes to bake. I set my timer for 10 minutes, then rotated each pan 180 degrees so that it cooks evenly on all sides, and judged another 10 minutes would be enough to finish the job. Just check the cake by poking at it with a toothpick/fork/some small pointy object and make sure it doesn't come out sticky/wet with cake batter.
If it does, it's probably not done yet.

I'm so happy that the cake turned out great! After taking the time to put the layers together and decorate, it was definitely worth it. There's nothing better than making everyone around you happy, especially when you know it's because you gave them something tasty to put in their stomach. Plus, no one got sick, we all had fun, the birthday girl was happy, and therefore we were all happy! It was such a great night. I love my friends - they really are the best!

Happy Birthday, Kerri!

A Sneak Peak at Future Delicious Moments

I guess it's official. I'm going to be having lunch at Akelaŕe when I visit San Sebastian in the Basque!

So, this is just a tiny peak at what is to come for this summer while I'm abroad:

On the weekend of July 19th - 21st I will be traveling to San Sebastian to do some research on culinary preservation in the Basque.

As you can see, we (my sister and me) have made a reservation for a tasting menu for lunch at 3 Michelin star restaurant, Akelaŕe! After that, we'll get settled in the apartment we rented out for the weekend, explore San Sebastian until we get hungry again, eat, and then get ready for a Pintxos Bar Crawl! I wonder how much my mom will be able to drink...

On Saturday, I'll be going to the Basque Culinary Center for a tour of the school in the morning :) 

After that, we'll be off to Axpe for lunch at Asador Etxebarri.

In the evening, once we get hungry again (or thirsty for that matter), we will have dinner at Sidreria Petritegi and have unlimited glasses of cider until midnight - a cab is definitely going to be needed - because (as my sister said) we are in it to win it!

Our last day will be Sunday, July 21st, and our delicious weekend will end with a tour and tasting of txacoli at Txomin Etxaniz and lunch at Elkano in Getaria.

After all of that, it's off to the train station and back to Alcala for me. But, wow, so much to look forward to on this one weekend and there are still so many other weekends to plan! I can't believe that literally a month after today (or I guess I should say yesterday) I will be leaving to study abroad and do things like this on my weekends and call it "research!"

I seriously can't wait.

P.S.: Thank you to my sister, Sophie, for helping me put all of this together! I couldn't do it without her.

Cigar: Lumpia in disguise!

If you think that's something you can smoke, I'll tell you right now, it's not.

This isn't a cigar, it's a lumpia (a filipino egg roll). I made it for my independent study about the geography of food last semester. Unfortunately I don't know what I did with the recipe for this foolish looking food, but I promise I'll scavenge for it so I can post how I did it! 

I was influenced by Chef Homaro Cantu from Moto in Chicago who made a cuban sandwich look like a cuban cigar.

For this food challenge, my final, I had to create a dish of molecular cuisine by changing the components of the dish to make it look like something it's not. I'll get more into detail about it later, and I promise I'll find the recipe and instructional video of how to make this dish and post it as soon as I can.

Note To Self:

When making a syrup, don't forget about it when it's simmering on the stove, or else you'll end up with burned sugar of caramel-like-consistency all over your stove and cooking pot - which I'm sure you do not want to clean up.

So much for studying. Looks like I need to clean my kitchen that now smells like burned stupidity.