Green is the colour of....green tea :)

• Take two of your favourite baking/cooking/drinking ingredients:

• Combine with butter, egg yolk, sugar, flour, vanilla extract and a bit of baking powder.
• Divide mixture into 3 portions.
• Shape it into your favourite/preferred shape
• Bake it in the oven for a while
• And you get....

Sounds pretty damn easy doesn't it?? Except... it only took me the whole afternoon to do it! and to top it off.. I burnt the chocolate ones :'(

Saturday, 8th July 2006, Bethany (Alv's little niece) turned a whole 10months old! (I'm so Jealous! The lil bub's so cute!) His bro invited us over for dinner... whether it was just a lil nice celebration or just a get together since his mum was away. Anyway, I felt like we were imposing and free loading off them again (because it's not the first time we've been over to their place for dinner) so I decided to bring "something" along for after dinner.

Since it was just going to be a quick one, I decided against a heavy/full blown dessert. It's hard to have long dinners and such with a baby around since they have to follow a strict routine: ie. dinner at 6pm, bethany's bath after dinner, all tucked in before 7:30pm etc etc. Bethany's begining to realise/notice things and would not go to sleep if she knows there are visitors around.

I have been wanting to make something with the rest of my matcha green tea and have been craving butter cookies, I thought: why not make matcha butter cookies.. better yet, why not make butter, matcha and chocolate butter cookies.. yah!!

So I googled for a butter cookies recipe (was too lazy to look into my collection of cookbooks) and settled on one that would make about 6 dozens from southernfood.about.com (I think). Sounds a lot, but I figured that I would make: one lot for Jerome and Deb, one lot for me and one lot for Kathy (my boss who drove me to work every day for about 6 weeks when I was on crutches earlier this year). Been wanting to say/give a thank you present for a while but wasn't sure what to get her. So 6 dozens would work out just fine, 2 dozens for each lot and 2 dozens each of butter, matcha and chocolate cookies. yumm...

Why did it take a whole afternoon? Well.. I didn't start til about 2ish, had to mix the initial lot of butter cookie dough and then divided it into three portions (one for each flavour); and shape it into square logs and refridgerate it for about 30mins so that it would be firmer and easier to cut.

Then the oven (gas and fan forced) kept stuffing up, even though I had turned it on, the fire kept going off and I didnt realise it until after the first lot of cookies went in that the oven was not working. Anyway, to cut a long story short, we had to be at J & D's at 5:30pm. By the time the last lot went in it was close to 5:00pm and as I was pressed for time I turned the temperature up a bit and left it on for a bit longer than intended. Big mistake because I ended up over baking and burning the chocolate cookies. *bawl*

I have to say though, the sweetness of the butter cookies really contrasted with the matcha and chocolate cookies. The matcha cookies had a 'hint' of sweetness but was very 'green tealicious' kind of reminded me of these 'green tea snowball' things I bought from Uzu at Caulfield a while back. Except those snowball things were a bit harder, the size of a big malteser and had icing sugar all over it. Meanwhile the chocolate cookies tasted like dark chocolate cookies. Yum yum.

In the end, decided to dust a bit of icing sugar on the matcha and chocolate cookies to sweeten it up a bit. Saved another disasterous baking session! *phew*