I realise that matcha-flavoured sweet treats are likely to divide public opinion. Mary Berry once commented that some poor contestant’s green tea bake tasted ‘a bit like grass’ on the Great British Bake Off. My husband turned down a cookie this week, perhaps for the first time ever, first saying he hadn’t eaten one ‘because he thought they weren’t baked’ and when he did have a nibble, he preferred to go hungry rather than eat the rest of it. In his defence, it is unusual to come across green cookies.

But I really love the flavour of matcha. Gorgeously complex in a creamy ice cream, as I tried it whilst wandering the streets of Japan, as the pure frothy tea served with little sweetmeats during the tea ceremony and transposed into sophisticated French pastries by Sadaharu Aoki: I love them all.  It was many years ago in Paris that I made the pilgrimage to the 6th arrondissement to sample these latter delights. At the time, I had quit my job in London and was looking for work in France, flirting with the idea of opening a bakery of my own. I kidded myself that I was doing market research. (Shortly afterwards I was offered a job back in the world of brand strategy and my bakery dream faded into the background)

Anyway, back to matcha … Most recently I stumbled across it in a big American-style soft cookie. I was on my way to a mum and baby social and, coming straight from swimming, I knew any homemade goodies wouldn’t survive the journey, so I planned to stop off at a cookie shop I had ogled a few months previously, and pick up supplies.

First of all, the craziest thing about this cookie shop is not just that it’s still in business, despite being a little off the beaten track and in Paris, home of the boulangerie-patisserie and where snacking is seriously frowned-upon, but that on a wet and windswept Thursday afternoon in December, there were 3 couriers waiting to bike and scooter boxes of not-exactly-cheap cookies to Parisians in the vicinity.

When the boxes of joy had been despatched, it was my turn to chose.  My eye was drawn to the peanut butter varieties. Guaranteed crowd-pleasers, they were an obvious pick. Ditto a double chocolate delight. But then I noticed the matcha cookie … There was matcha with milk or dark chocolate, matcha with cranberries and white chocolate or a purist’s version. And that is the one I picked.  Perversely somehow, because even when I had the chance to try it at the tea party, I passed it over for one of the peanut butter ones. In fact, I left it so late that I nearly missed out on tasting it altogether. Thankfully, I didn’t. It was sweet, earthy, tender and I couldn’t stop thinking about it afterwards. Having mentally ridiculed the people having boxes of cookies couriered, I then went online fully intending to order a single-variety box of the pure matcha cookies. Sadly my address is outside their delivery zone so I set to work recreating it.

My starting point was a cookie recipe I had stumbled upon a couple of months previously, when trying to find a way to use up an impulse purchase of nougat. It resulted in gorgeously soft cookies but were a little too flat for the almost-cakey discs I was trying to conjure up. So I tried a little more flour plus a good helping of matcha tea powder (I had a bag in stock, left over from my homemade ice-cream endeavours). A bit of tinkering later, I made 2 observations. The first is that undercooking these cookies is the secret to their beauty. I cannot overstate the importance of this. With exactly the same recipe, a minute too long in the oven produces pleasant but un-noteworthy cookies, whilst a hint of uncooked centre makes for one of the best cookies you’ve ever tasted. The trick I found was to take the cookies out as soon as the first crack appeared on the top and then leave to cool.

My second observation is that white chocolate really sets of the bitter matcha flavour. An added bonus is that if you accidentally overcook these cookies, the white chocolate will go a long way to redeeming them. The pure matcha cookies that I over-baked were all wrong and went in the bin.

So set your stopwatch for 8 minutes and if your oven is anything like mine, 9 minutes of baking will bring you cakey cookie perfection. You’re welcome.

Matcha & white chocolate cakey cookies

Ingredients

• 150g soft unsalted butter
• 200g light muscovado sugar
• 100g caster sugar
• 1 fridge-cold egg
• 2 tsp vanilla essence
• 270g plain flour
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 3/4 tsp baking powder
• 3 tblsp matcha powder
• 100g white chocolate chunks

Method

Cream the butter and two types of sugar for 5 minutes, in a mixer or with handheld beaters until the mixture becomes much lighter in colour and creamy.

Add the egg and the vanilla as you continue mixing.

In a separate bowl, mix together the flour, baking soda, baking powder and matcha powder and then add to the rest. If you are using a mixer, you can keep it running as you add a spoonful at a time until it all comes together. It will be quite a stiff mixture at this point.

Finally, fold in the chocolate chunks. This will take a bit of effort to get them evenly distributed.

Using a spoon, take out walnut-sized amounts and roll lightly into balls between your hands. Pop them all on some greaseproof paper and chill in the fridge for at least 30 minutes.

In the meantime, preheat the oven to 180°C.

Space the cookies at least 5 cm apart on a lined baking tray and bake for 8-9 minutes. When that first crack appears on top, take them out of the oven and leave them to cool. Wait 5 minutes and then life them up on the baking paper and place on a cooling rack.

These are so good slightly warm, when the white chocolate is molten but are also delicious for many days to come if kept in an airtight container.