I’m not a very good baker because I don’t like to follow recipes, but I was craving some sort of Matcha dessert so I decided to make a Matcha Rollcake.

I browsed through some recipes online and settled for this one, which worked out well.

Ingredients:

Unsalted butter, 20 g
Whole milk, 1 tbsp

Egg yolk, 3 each
Granulated sugar (I used turbinado), 70 g
Egg white from 4 eggs
All purpose flour, 35 g
Baking grade matcha (I used drinking grade), 10 g

For the filling:
Matcha, 1 tspn
Whole milk, 1 tbsp
Granulated sugar, 2 tbsp
Heavy cream, 100ml
(This is what the recipe calls for but I made more)

1. Set the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit (180 degrees Celsius).
2. Line a sheet tray (28cm x 24cm or 30cm x 30cm) with baking/parchment paper.
3. Combine the butter and one tablespoon of whole milk and melt in the microwave (or over a hot water bath).
4. To make the sponge cake, cream the yolks and half the sugar (35g) together until thick and light in color.
5. In a separate bowl, make a meringue by whisking the egg whites. Add the rest of the sugar (35g) in 3-4 different stages. Once you have soft-firm peaks, add a third of the meringue to the yolk mixture.
6. Mix well and return to the bowl with the meringue. Use a rubber spatula to blend everything together. Don’t mix hard- just scoop the mixture up from the bottom of the bowl. If you mix too hard, you will end up with a flat sponge cake.
7. Sift the flour and matcha into this mixture and mix further.
8. Once everything has combined well (and there are no lumps), add the butter and milk you melted in the microwave. Stir everything together without removing the air pockets.
9. Pour the mixture onto the sheet tray evenly and bake for 10-13 minutes (it is ready if you stick a bamboo skewer into it and no batter sticks to it). If you over bake it the cake will be dry and hard to roll.
10. When you remove it from the oven, remove the cake from the sheet tray (on the parchment paper) and cool.
11. Once it has cooled you can keep it covered with plastic wrap.
12. To make the filling, mix the sugar, matcha and milk together until the matcha has fully integrated into the milk.
13. Add the heavy cream and whip until it has firm peaks (if you over whip it just fix it by adding more heavy cream).
14. Cut the sponge cake so you have clean ends.
15. Pour the cream over the entire cake (but taper off towards the end and leave about an inch gap at the end.
16. Roll the cake and cover with plastic wrap. Refrigerate for at least one hour before slicing with a sharp knife!

I also made a variation for this a couple of weeks later. With sakura (cherry blossom) season around the corner, I was thinking about making sakura mochi but I couldn’t get any doumyoujiko (glutinous rice that has been milled down) so I decided to make a matcha rollcake using salted sakura blossoms and leaves.

To make this, before I poured the sponge cake batter onto the sheet tray, I lay some of the sakura blossoms (soaked in some water and dried before use) and leaves on the parchment paper.

For the filling, instead of making a matcha cream, I folded in some home cooked tsubu an (cooked red beans sweetened with sugar and kokuto brown sugar) and chopped salted sakura leaves (I would leave this out next time because the salt was a little too much).