Matcha Green Tea Cupcakes with Pomegranate Frosting Recipe

For the past month I've been taking Wilton cake decorating classes at Michaels. I thought I could use some help learning how to pipe flowers. It's been pretty fun so far, my sister is taking them with me. We started course 2 yesterday and we finish course 1 on Monday. So far we've worked on how to assemble and frost a cake, transferring patterns onto a cake, piping stars and shells, and piping roses, rosettes, rosebuds and chrysanthemums. Next week is royal icing.

I've had to make a cake every week for the classes, so making cupcakes on top of that seemed excessive. Which is sad, given the quality of my class cakes. I've just been using cake mixes and they require you to use the Wilton recipe for the frosting (translation: Waaaaaaaayyyyy too much shortening and tasteless). The frosting tastes so terrible I'm almost embarassed to give them away but I do anyway because they wouldn't get eaten here. I think it's worth making a few terrible cakes to learn some new skills though, so I plan to take all of the courses.

My aunt is visiting this weekend, and as a regular reader of my blog, she requested cupcakes so I made a batch especially for her.

I'd been planning to make matcha cupcakes for a long time now. I've made matcha frosting successfully, and I wanted to see how it would work in the actual cake. I was going to make these for Halloween because of the freaky green colour, but I made a Wilton cake instead, lol.

The cupcakes themselves turned out dense and moist and not too sweet, and the green tea taste is really mild but nice. I'm happy with them. The frosting is a buttercream made with pomegranate molasses and it's incredible. Definitely one of the best I've made. The two flavours work together well. All in all these are some pretty yummy cakes!
Recipe: Matcha Green Tea Cupcakes with Pomegranate Frosting

Cupcakes (Makes approx. 15 cupcakes)

Ingredients:

• 1 stick of butter (1/2 cup), room temperature
  
• 1 cup of sugar
• 2 eggs, separated and at room temperature
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 1/2 Tbsp matcha powder plus enough all-purpose flour to make 1 1/2 cups
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1/2 cup milk

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

In a large bowl, cream together butter and sugar with an electric mixer on medium speed until fluffy (about 3 or 4 minutes). Add egg yolks one at a time, beating for 1 minute after each addition. Add vanilla and mix until combined.

In a separate bowl, combine flour, matcha, baking powder and salt. Add to creamed mixture, alternating with milk and mixing well after each addition.

In another bowl, beat egg whites with clean beaters until stiff peaks form. Gently fold into the cupcake batter until the colour of the batter is uniform.

Fill lined cupcake cups half full. Bake 22 to 25 minutes or until tests done with a toothpick.


Frosting

Ingredients

• 1 stick of butter (1/2 cup) at room temperature
• 1/2 cup shortening
• 1 lb (500g) bag of icing sugar
• 1/2 tsp vanilla
  
• 1/2 Tbsp milk
• 2 1/2 Tbsp pomegranate molasses

Cream together butter and shortening. Add vanilla, milk and molasses and mix well. Gradually add icing sugar. Add more milk if necessary.

Note: The pomegranate molasses turns the frosting an ugly shade of brown, so you may wish to add a little bit of red icing colouring for a frosting a little more reminiscent of pomegranate.

The flavour of this frosting is relatively mild. If you want to kick it up a notch with some sourness, I recommend drizzling a little more of the pomegranate molasses on top of each cupcake.