White Chip Matcha Cookies

prep time: 10 minutes + 35 minutes resting timecook time: 13 minutesservings: about 9 cookies

In our house, we love cookies all year round but during the summer we are not really in the mood for cinnamon-spiced oatmeal cookies or pistachio snowballs. These soft and chewy green tea-flavored cookies with large white chocolate chunks have become a family favorite for the warmer months. The Matcha powder is refreshing and has earthy notes, which go great with white chocolate. These cookies are just the right amount of sweet and tart and perfect for dunking into a tall, cold glass of milk.

Matcha powder is actually made from ground green tea leaves and has become very popular in recent years. The powder, which is mostly produced in Japan, is nowadays readily available in supermarkets, health food shops or from online retailers. Besides being used to brew green tea, the powder is also often used to flavor and color desserts. Matcha powder, just like leafy green tea, is said to be rich in antioxidants, vitamins and fibers, which has given it the trendy label of "superfood". There are different grades of Matcha: ceremonial, premium and culinary, with ceremonial being the purest and being mostly used in traditional Japanese tea brewing ceremonies. Though culinary is the lowest grade, it is still great for cooking and baking, as it often has a stronger, full-bodied flavor, which makes it perfect to season your dishes.

As the Matcha tastes quite strong and tart, it is important to balance its bitterness with a white chocolate which can hold its own. Good quality white chocolate is usually never perfectly white but rather has an ivory color, due to the cocoa butter, the fat derived from the cacao bean. My personal favorite is the white chocolate from Côte d'Or, a Belgian chocolate brand, which can be found in most supermarkets in the BENELUX region and all over Europe. It is extremely rich and has a distinctive flavor which allows it to stand out against the earthiness of the Matcha powder. Especially for this recipe, investing in some good quality white chocolate is important. I like to cut the chocolate into large chunks so that they create creamy, sweet pockets in the baked cookies. However, I also do not like to overload the cookies with chocolate, so I usually only use about four of the little chocolate bars or approximately 100 g.

The rest of the ingredients are pantry staples: flour (preferably type 405), brown sugar, some white sugar, salt, baking soda, melted butter, one egg and optionally, some vanilla extract or paste. As I already said, I like to go lighter on the chocolate as well as on the sugar in this recipe but in return, I am a bit heavy-handed on the Matcha powder with about 2 slightly heaped tablespoons of Matcha. Most recipes are simply too lax for my taste with regard to the green tea flavor and I prefer the cookies to pack a bit more of a green tea punch. People tend to either love or hate the Matcha flavor, so if you make these cookies for Matcha lovers, you might as well go all out with the green tea flavor.

To make the dough, first combine your dry ingredients, the flour, Matcha, salt and baking powder in a bowl and mix well and set aside. In a mixing bowl, add the melted butter as well as your two types of sugar and mix them on medium-high speed for about 3 minutes to incorporate the sugar into the butter. Add the egg and the optional vanilla paste and whisk again on medium-high speed until the mixture turns creamy and lighter in color. Add about a third of your dry ingredients and mix it in on the lowest setting to avoid the flour from dusting too much, and repeat the process two times. After having added all your dry ingredients, turn the speed up to medium to make sure that everything is well incorporated. Fold in the white chocolate chunks, either by hand or on the lowest mixer setting. The dough should now be compact, wet but not sticky and have an intense green color. Let the dough rest in the fridge for about 30 minutes. This will help prevent the cookies from spreading out too much in the oven.

About 10 minutes before taking the dough out of the fridge, turn on your oven to 160 degrees Celsius on the circulating heat setting and prep a baking tray with a sheet of parchment paper. If you have parchment paper which does not wanna lay flat, just crumple it up in your hands before smoothing it out on the baking tray. This will help it to stay flat and in place. Using your hands, roll about ping pong-sized dough balls and place them on the baking tray, making sure to leave enough space between the dough balls. I usually put about 9 cookies per baking sheet and bake the cookies for exactly 13 minutes on the middle rack of your oven. This kinda hits the sweet spot for these cookies: the edges have only ever so slightly browned and the inside is still soft and chewy. Let the cookies rest on the baking tray for about five minutes before transferring them to a cooling rack to cool down completely. Store the cookies in a container, where they keep for up to a week, but in our house, they never really last that long.

Besides Matcha flavored desserts, Matcha flavored drinks are also hugely popular, such as Matcha lattes. Matcha is mixed with milk and sweetener and served hot or cold over ice. If you wanna get the complete Matcha experience, I recommend you fix yourself an iced Matcha latte to go with these delicious cookies. This is a perfect combo for the summer. You will need about 350 ml of cold milk (dairy or plant-based), 2 teaspoons of Matcha powder and 2 teaspoons of sweetener, such as sugar, honey or agave syrup. I prefer to use a blender to blitz all the ingredients together before serving it with a couple of ice cubes.

In case you are not a fan of Matcha, you can of course forego the Matcha powder in the recipe and switch out the white chocolate for some milk or dark chocolate and you will end up with some amazingly delicious and chewy chocolate chip cookies. Pour yourself a glass of chocolate milk and dunk in. This is such an easy, can't-go-wrong recipe and the cookies are just perfect for a sweet afternoon snack or to serve at parties and BBQs.