They work better that way as the butter cream, the ganache and the glaze are all rich and you wouldn’t want a big blob of any of them! I like to serve with coffee flavoured Créme Anglaise for this cake, and of course for this green tea version, a little matcha sauce for a finishing touch wouldn’t be amiss either!Īs I’ve mentioned, Matthew doesn’t really like Japanese sweets and this opera cake wasn’t an exception either. I think one of the key aspects of getting this dessert to taste better is making all the layers as thin as possible (you may not be able to tell from the picture, but I always make it less than 3cm height in total). I personally could have gone for a stronger tea flavour, but I imagine how it turned out may be enough for my British friends… For this green tea opera cake, I added matcha to the sponge as well as the butter cream – although the finished colour looked quite green (I couldn’t get the exact colour in the picture), it tasted more subtle than I thought – the tea flavour comes as more of an after taste. Since I had some variations of matcha (powdered green tea) desserts in Paris a while ago, I’ve always wanted to try making some myself too. I’ve always made this cake with a classic combination of coffee flavoured butter cream and ganache sandwiched with almond sponge (joconde), so this time I wanted to give a little twist to the recipe.

This classic, really rich and chocolatey dessert is usually one of Matthew’s favourites – but alas, not this time.

However, as I couldn’t find the perfect combination in which I wanted to present, I decided to compromise and combine several different recipes together.įor the purpose of the step-by-step process of making this cake, I will start with the layers I did chronologically rather than from base to top layer.We’ve had such lovely weather over the bank holiday weekend – I just didn’t feel like staying in and cooking at all… Now the weather is back to typical British and so I’m back in my kitchen too. There are several recipes out there to make a Matcha Gateau or a Matcha Layered Cake. Feeling as if I was put to a pressure test on Masterchef and with only 3 and a bit hours before the party was to start at 12pm, I commenced on Operation Matcha Opera Gateau. I knew what I had to do but I’d never done it before. I couldn’t let the team down! I had to bring something spectacular. I woke up feeling positive (and re-energised). With that in mind, I woke up early the next morning (7am for a Saturday planned sleep in is way too early) and started banging around the kitchen. She announced that she would be bringing Matcha Brownies!! Oh, to seven hells of damnation.

…as I was preparing to go to bed, I looked up my instagram feed just in time to see that Daisy had also changed her mind about what she was bringing to the party. So I went to bed and told the guys that we’ll be bringing simple matcha brownies. He just can’t as he refuses to follow baking instructions and makes it up as he goes, which just doesn’t work when it comes to baking.Īfter a very busy and long week at work, a late night before the day of the Matcha party, I had given up on The Boy’s plan (he had given up the previous week to come up with an idea and told me that it was all up to me!). I knew this meant disaster for me as he doesn’t bake and has not entered into this foray as willingly as I have. When Thanh decided to throw a Matcha (Green Tea for the uninitiated) Party at Michele’s house, The Boy’s mind went into over-drive. Our friends know that we never bring what we promise at the beginning and/or that we bring what we say we are but it turns out to be completely different (case in point Salmon Rillettes). However, this means that on the lists of who’s cooking what, it always reads this sentence, “ something crazy“. Usually it works and we are happy with the end result (or I am at the very least, The Boy sets very high standards for himself and most often doesn’t meet them).

Usually when our group of food loving friends decide to throw a food themed party, I would let The Boy come up with the dish of what he wants to make, watch him have a kitchen disaster, assist in taking over and then presenting the dish at the end of the day.

Matcha opera cake