Matcha Cookies!

Hello everyone! Today I am posting about some morning baking projects!

When I went grocery shopping this past Sunday, I had some projects in mind (ideas pulled from Pinterest) for saving money and keeping delicious food in the fridge. One of those projects was the breakfast rollups:

I apologize for the terrible picture. If you can tell, breakfast rollups are basically sausages and cheese wrapped up in Pillsbury crescent rolls. The Pinterest post included egg, but I was impatient and had no time for scramblin' eggs! They were SO GOOD, though, and would go well with a side of scrambled egg and orange juice for a complete breakfast!

My other baking project was matcha cookies! Now, I am currently obsessed with making cookies out of cake mixes; the cookies come out so soft and moist and delicious that it's almost a sin to consume them! I wanted to try a recipe that used cream cheese, so I searched and picked the recipe with the most stars, which happened to be a Betty Crocker recipe. Here is the link:

http://www.bettycrocker.com/recipes/cake-mix-gooey-butter-cookies/f7a9017b-870f-4b20-b37f-392f53c65fbc

Since I am a rebel and don't follow recipes to a T, I used the following ingredients:

They were having a sale on Pillsbury cake mixes at the grocery store.

I'm using matcha in the recipe because I am obsessed with this stuff right now! Matcha green tea is the powdered form of the tea leaf; unlike steeped tea, which steeps the leaf in water before removing it, matcha is combined with water and consumed entirely. Matcha is high in antioxidants and is a possible preventative of cancer. It is quite possible that matcha is the healthiest drink in the universe. So adding matcha to your cooking, baking, beauty products, and skin care is actually very good for you!

So the first thing I did was to melt the cream cheese and butter until it was soft.

After that I added the egg and vanilla extract. I know, in the picture it says "imitation vanilla," but that's from a time when my husband went out grocery shopping and of course he bought cheap, which I don't have a problem with, but I'd prefer the real stuff to imitation.

After beating these ingredients together, I added the cake mix.

Elliot was in the kitchen helping mommy make matcha cookies!

I was unsure how much matcha to use in the mix and I was too lazy to look up a recipe, so I just dumped in about a Tbsp. Now, the thing about matcha is that the taste is bitter. The smell is bitter. If you don't add sugar to the drink, it is bitter. Some people prefer that; I on the other hand need sugar with my tea. But when you add the matcha to the cookie mix, you don't need any extra sugar to mask the bitterness; the dough was delicious!

You can see the faint greenish tint to the cookie dough from just that small amount of matcha!

I had to clean off my pan (I have one baking sheet, and yes, I know I need more) and do one batch at a time. The first batch came out a little brown on the sides, but this is because I was not monitoring the oven properly (the baby needed a diaper change and a bottle). The next batch will probably come out much better. Trying one of the cookies, they are delicious!

Before baking

I'm sorry I have no "after baking" pictures right now. I wanted to get this blog post in while the baby was sleeping! But the conclusion to the matcha cookie experiment is that they are quite yummy. I would highly encourage people to make their own matcha cookies, not only for the taste but for the added health benefits!