Baking with genmaicha powder

This week for something different – I’m a food blog now!

Anyone who’s benefited from proximity to me in the kitchen knows I’m a bit of an experimental baker, and now I have lots of tea cooking powders to add to the mix. Obubu makes a few different matcha cooking powders, as well as houjicha, genmaicha, and wakoucha cooking powders. If you’re wanting to bake with tea, these powders deliver much punchier results than infused tea. Back home I’ve played with matcha and black tea cooking powders, and in the last few weeks I’ve made houjicha banana bread and several attempts at carrot cake with genmaicha cream cheese icing. I have a particular love for carrot cake and cream cheese frosting, and I thought the sweet and creamy flavours could pair well with the roastier, nuttier notes of genmaicha. I pitched this to Julien, our resident sommelier/tea-food pairing expert, and then the mission was to deliver on his excitement for the concept.

My usual baking methodology is to find a few recipes, struggle to decide which to do, start following one, realise I’m missing some ingredients, pivot to another, then go entirely rogue and start doing my own thing. Sometimes this works out better than other times, and the first attempt at this cake was one of the less successful attempts. It may have also had to do with the distractions that I was also making djuvec and pretzels at the same time for our senpais’ farewell party / having intermittent birthday celebrations, but either way the end result was aesthetic but ultimately more a well-contained puddle than a cake. I think it’s safe to say Julien still enjoyed it.

I learned from the error of my ways, and the second attempt was much more successful. This time I went for cupcakes rather than cake to save on baking time and for ease of distribution. The cupcakes turned out wonderfully, but I still made up the frosting on the fly, so I needed to do a third run to get the amounts measured out. The cupcakes on the third attempt also went a bit wonky (hungry distracted baking may have been to blame here) – they erred more on the side of quiche than cupcake. So for the recipe proper we’re combining the 2nd batch cupcakes with 3rd batch frosting.

Cupcake ingredients

• 2 cups / 250 g flour
• 2 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt *
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon *
• 1 1/4 cup / 295 ml vegetable oil
• 1/2 cup / 100 g granulated sugar *
• 3/4 cup / 150 g brown sugar *
• 1 tsp vanilla *
• 4 eggs
• 2-3 big carrots, around 300 g

Optional:

• 1 tbsp yoghurt * (for fluffy moist texture)
• 1 dash of whiskey or rum * (we like it spicy)
• pecans, walnuts, raisins, or anything else you want to add in * (sadly no nuts in my test batches because I don’t want to poison Julien, but I think they would go well)

* Here’s why I’ll never be a real food blog: I’ve probably not done a single batch using these actual amounts. These are my target amounts based on different recipes I’ve looked at, but I always adjust this kind of stuff on the fly based on what texture/sweetness/other flavours I want in that moment. I’ll have done something around these guidelines, but maybe don’t take them too literally. Often I am simply too lazy to find a teaspoon and just chuck in an amount of cinnamon that looks right. Welcome to baking with chaos demon Maren! No wonder things don’t always turn out right…

Frosting ingredients

• 1 1/4 cup cream cheese
• 1 cup powdered sugar
• 1 tbsp genmaicha powder
• genmai for sprinkling on top

Recipe

1. Preheat your oven to 175 C / 350 F.
2. Shred or grate your carrots into small chunks.
3. Combine the dry ingredients in a bowl, and toss the shredded carrots in until they’re well-coated.
4. Combine the wet ingredients in another bowl and mix well.
5. Fold the wet ingredients into the mixture of carrots and dry ingredients.
6. Line your muffin tin with baking cups, and scoop your batter into them. They will rise quite a bit, so don’t overfill!
7. Bake at 175 C / 350 F for ~ 25-30 minutes, until the cupcakes are golden brown on top and inserting a toothpick comes out clean.
8. While the cupcakes are cooling, mix the powdered sugar and cream cheese into frosting, and add around 1 tablespoon of genmaicha powder. You can do this to taste – if you prefer a gentler genmaicha flavour, use less powder, and vice versa.
9. Wait until the cupcakes have cooled to frost them, otherwise the frosting might melt off. When they’re cool, frost them and top with a sprinkle of genmai!

Many thanks to everyone in Obubu House for helping me bake, for taste-testing everything (even the less successful batches), and of course for the emotional support when everything went wrong in new and interesting ways each time!

So there you go, folks back home can expect these when I’m back in town, and everyone else can try to recreate if you want! Remember you need to channel chaos Maren if you want to make these yourself – maybe forget some ingredients, add something else instead, break your piping bag, realise you don’t know how to work the oven, stuff like that. It’ll be fun!