Matcha Chiffon Cake Recipe

Happy New Year everyone!

Seems like I’m on a roll with making chiffon/sponge cakes.

Sunday was Jo’s 21st birthday surprise.

I intended to make her a macaron tower, but only found a miniature little styrofoam cone in Art Friend. A wee bit too small for the party but bought it anyway. So hopefully I’ll be using it some other time!

Anyway, the cake is a basic Matcha Chiffon Cake from Keiko Ishida’s Okashi, sweet treats made with love. I read many reviews on how this chiffon was a good one before attempting it. Overall, the texture of the chiffon is very light and tends towards more of the dry side (very much unlike the Pandan Chiffon).

I used a SMBC (same as the Rosette Orange Cake) to frost the cake and imbibed the chiffon with a 1:1 sugar syrup.

A few things I noticed when I was getting started on this matcha chiffon cake recipe was that the addition of the corn flour really made my meringue very dry, which probably made my meringue harder to fold in to the egg yolk mixture. Perhaps I was too intent on getting my meringue to stiff peaks that I overwhipped the whole thing. The cake still turned out fine eventually so all is cool!

The cake was a hit with the party guests. It’s times like these when people say that the cake you made is yummy that you feel inspired to bake more and experiment around. (Although I should definitely made a bigger cake. I don’t know what I was thinking when I made this 8″ cake for 30 ish guests :S everyone ended up with a square of cake haha)

Green Tea Chiffon Cake
Makes one 20-cm

Ingredients:

• 70g pastry flour or top flour
• 10g green tea powder
• 5 egg yolks
• 20g sugar
• 70g water
• 60g canola oil

  Meringue

• 90g sugar
• 10g corn flour or rice flour
• 5 egg whites (~180g)

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 160 degrees C
2. Combine egg yolks and sugar in a bowl and mix well. Add water and canola oil and blend together.
3. Sift flour & green tea powder together twice, then add to the egg yolk mixture until you get a sticky batter. Set aside
4. Make the meringue. Combine sugar & corn flour and set aside. Beat egg whites until foamy, then add half the sugar & flour mixture and continue beating for a few minutes. Add remaining of the mixture and beat until egg whites are glossy, with stiff peaks (my problem was that they weren’t glossy)
5. Add one-third of meringue to egg yolk mixture and fold in lightly (you don’t want to deflate the meringue), then add remaining meringue to fold to incorporate completely
6. Pour batter into ungreased pan. Place in oven and bake for 40-50 minutes
7. When done (skewer comes out clean), take cake out from oven and invert to cool in pan
8. Once completely cooled, take spatula to loosen sides of the pan before inverting onto a wire rack

Swiss Meringue Buttercream

Ingredients:

• 120g egg whites
• 200g sugar
• 300g unsalted butter, at room temperature

Directions:

1. Place egg whites and sugar over a bain marie until sugar is completely dissolved. Stir continuously
2. Bring to electric mixer and whip on high speed till the meringue reaches stiff peaks and has cooled
3. Add butter in pieces until combined. Continue to whip until you get a smooth buttercream

Happy Birthday Jo! I love you <3