“That’s Not Green Tea…It’s MINT!”

When it comes to baking my brother’s birthday cake, it’s often a collaboration between myself and my artistic sister. I tend to focus on the baking, since I bake from scratch, and my sister does the piping or surface decorations. It works well, because we play to our strengths, and for the most part, we’ve done pretty well, considering my brother tends to get the BEST. CAKES. EVER.

I wonder why.

Anyway, this year, we were kind of at a loss for ideas, up until I stared at my sister and went: “Well, Gale likes Oreos so much, we can make him a giant Oreo cake. With matcha filling.”

Hence the giant Oreo cake was born. Except I didn’t even use any Oreos. So can it really be called an Oreo cake?

Probably not. We’ll call it a Dark Chocolate Mint–er, Matcha–Surprise.

The funny bit is that my brother was actually around long enough to see the layers at work. I employed two frostings and two types of cake batter to make this cake, and for some reason he kept looking at the green cake and couldn’t put a name to it. So whenever he stared long and hard at the green cake, my sister and I tended to say, “This isn’t your cake. It’s mint.”

But it’s not really mint, you guys. Of course it’s not. I mean, honestly, how can anyone really mistake the distinct green of matcha powder?

(That said, I kind of colored both the batter and frosting with forest green coloring to bring out the vibrancy of the green.)

You’ll find the recipes of things I found below:

Dark Chocolate Cake – This was super moist and awesome. My main fear about making a large, triple-layered cake was that the cakes would dry out. Thankfully, the chocolate cake recipe was super moist since it employed vegetable oil instead of butter.

Green Tea Pound Cake – This was the heavier and smaller layer that got sandwiched between the two dark chocolate cake layers. This was straightforward, and I still have a lot of matcha powder for baking. But of course I do. I always keep a stock of matcha handy!

Chocolate Frosting – Straightforward. You really can’t eff up chocolate frosting unless you try really hard to do so. Or replace powdered sugar with salt (HOW?!).

Matcha Cream Cheese Frosting – This was definitely my favorite flavor in the cake, hands down. Alone, the frosting is super-sweet and super-cream cheesy. But think about the dark bitterness of the chocolate cake and the slight matcha-tasting pound cake! If there’s something that can tie all of the pieces together, it was definitely this frosting. And holy hell, that green tea flavor really came out after putting this frosting on.

My sister did the piping, so I couldn’t show you the process even if I wanted to. At that point, I’d done my job and gone to bed, because of course school night. Sigh.

Verdict: Sooooo good. Even my brother quite enjoyed it. Maybe next year, we’ll make a peanut butter cup cake…except without peanut butter, because my brother’s allergic. I  mean…it’s definitely a great way to troll him!