A few weeks ago on a Sunday I headed to the Adelaide Botanic Gardens for my first bi-monthly meeting of the Adelaide Cake Liberation Front (CLF). For those who haven’t heard of the CLF, it’s a movement that began in the UK. It’s about making delicious food free from animal products and sharing it around. Basically it’s a bunch of vegans (non vegans are welcome) who sit sound and eat dessert (and quiche).

So anyway for my first meet I decided to make shortbread. I had originally intended to make gluten free almond shortbread but I messed it up and had to dump the batch in the bin :(. I Googled another recipe and came up with this one. During my search I saw a few recipes for matcha shortbread and since I had some matcha powder in the cupboard, I decided to add some in.

Matcha powder is green tea leaves ground up extremely fine.

Ingredients:

250 Grams of Vegan Margarine (Nuttelex).

110 Grams of Caster Sugar.

360 Grams of Plain Flour.

2 Teaspoons of Matcha Powder.

Method:

Set oven to 190 degrees Celsius / 375 Fahrenheit.

Cream the Margarine and Sugar in a bowl.

Stir in flour and matcha a little bit at a time until you get a smooth paste.

Put dough on bench and roll out until 1 centimeter thick. Cut into even pieces and put on a baking tray. I didn’t do this step and instead just put vaguely even globs of dough on the tray.

Put tray in fridge for 20 minutes. I omitted this step as the damned tray was too big for the fridge!

Place in the oven and bake for 15 to 20 minutes or until pale golden brown, although with the addition of the matcha pale golden brown in kind of a useless measurement.

Cook on a wire rack and then eat.

Verdict: I made a few mistakes. The margarine and sugar wasn’t creamed properly and that was apparent upon eating. I added more than the 2 teaspoons of matcha and this led to a slightly bitter aftertaste. Also due to my shoddy measuring (I blame my flatmates set of weird, high volume scales) the dough was wetter than intended, resulting in a slightly chewy texture rather than the desired crumbliness. However they were still yummy and the people at the CLF meet up ate them up.