Green Tea Ice Cream Cake

Dad’s 50th birthday was coming up, and having being unsatisfied by most green tea cakes available in Melbourne, I decided to bake a cake I had been eyeing for a long time from Gourmet Baking. Given I don’t have an ice cream maker, and am virtually bankrupt at the moment, I decided on adapting the recipe with a super simple “non-machine-requiring ice cream”.

Green Tea Ice Cream

[Recipe courtesy of The Catty Life]

Cooking time: 10 min. Though need to make ice cream well before ? i.e. at least a day before to allow freezing.

Difficulty: easy

Makes: around 500ml (mine seemed to be a lot less than Catty Life’s estimated 1L)

Ingredients:

300mL pure fresh cream (I just used thickened cream)
100mL condensed milk
20 grams matcha powder
1/2 teaspoon vanilla essence

Method:

Whisk the fresh cream with an electric mixer while slowly incorporating the matcha powder.
Continue whisking until soft peaks form.
Stir in the condensed milk and vanilla essence with a spoon.
Freeze in a container for 12 hours.

Green Tea Chiffon Cake[Recipe courtesy of Gourmet Baking]

Cooking time: 15-30min preparation, 20 min baking.

Difficulty: easy-moderate

Ingredients:

4 eggs (separate the yolk from the white). TIP: use a sharp knife and tap on where you want to crack the egg. This creates a much cleaner edge that will less likely pierce your yolk in the handling process.
100 g sugar (divided to 25g, 75g)
75 g cake flour (Ideally use cake flour since low protein means fluffier cake. Otherwise can substitute with plain (all purpose) flour ? for each cup of cake flour in recipe, use 2 tablespoons less of plain flour.)
10 g green tea powder
1/2 tsp baking powder
pinch of salt
50 g milk
50 g vegetable oil

Method:

Preheat oven to 1800C (1650C fan forced) and prepare two lined 8″ (20cm) round pans
Whisk the egg yolk and 25 g sugar until it becomes a little pale.
Add in milk and oil, whisk well.
Combine flour, green tea powder, baking powder, and salt and sift them. Set aside.
In another bowl, whip the egg whites until frothy, then add the remaining 75 g sugar gradually and continue whipping until it forms a glossy stiff peak.
Add the flour to the yolk mixture and whisk well
Fold in the egg white, making sure there is no big lumps of meringue. DON’T overfold!!!
Divide the batter between the two pans and bake it for about 20 minutes or until done.
Let cool until ready to use.

Putting it all together:

Alternate layer of cake and ice cream.
Decorate with cream if desired.

End result:

Albeit not as pretty as Gourmet Baking’s creation, it was a delectable frozen ice cream sandwich ? mouth wateringly bittersweet. I also sprinkled some sliced almonds mum had conveniently toasted for a bit of crunchy goodness too!

Overall, I particularly love the 4 ingredient ice cream recipe and how the green tea powder ratio is higher in the recipe ? makes for an awesome bitter-sweet ice cream that’s so easy to make!!! YUM ? shall be making a lot of more it!

Issues:

I found the layering process rather cumbersome, especially on a hot humid day ? too hard when frozen to spread, but then once it started melting it melted too fast. I ended up freezing the whole cake before serving, which unfortunately caused the originally super fluffy and light chiffon cake to harden up. Although the higher density wasn’t intended, it had quite a nice buttery (if I can describe it so, despite no butter content) feel to it.

Possible alternative: serve ice cream in scoops to eat with the cake? Try pre-chilling the cake layers or on “cold” days instead? Any other suggestions / advice? =)

You may also like: Double Chocolate Brownies, Effortless meal #1, Wine Tasting.