This cake was for my dad’s birthday, which I remembered just in time. With about an hour left in the day. I was just shocked because I never forget, but I guess October just crept in on me.

It’s hard baking for my parents, because they don’t actually like sweets and desserts. Last year while in Paris, I got some pastries from Pierre Hermé as my “birthday cake”, which I freaked out over the entire time eating it (as you can imagine)– scrutinizing and appreciating every component, every layer, every texture. I was so excited. Then my dad said something along the lines of, “this is good, but I’d rather eat lobster”. Um, excuse you dad, but lobsters are BORN delicious (sorry vegetarians/vegans)… these pastries had to be conceived, developed and refined, sourcing the best ingredients, until perfection was attained. Anyway, my point is, it’s really hard to impress my parents with sweet things.

Despite knowing he’d rather have lobster, I thought that at least I’ll make his cake with familiar flavours– matcha and black sesame.

  

You actually rarely see the combination of matcha + black sesame, or matcha + red bean in Chinese desserts. It’s usually a solo-thing, like simply just black sesame pudding or red bean cake. It’s actually always bothered me when I see that combination– like, you can’t just combine two flavours just because they’re both Asian. Then, why am I not seeing goji berry-lotus seed cupcakes? Sweet potato-mango pudding? Coconut + dried chrysanthemum buns?

But I did it anyway, because I wasn’t feeling very creative, and it was either that or matcha-apple, matcha-peanut butter or matcha-cheddar caramel popcorn, which I don’t think would’ve gone over very well.

The addition of white chocolate is a no brainer; white chocolate and matcha is a match-a made in heaven, and it makes for a lovely contrast in colour.

As always, major strugs while decorating the cake. The icing was great to work with, light and whipped in consistency, but since my cake layers were frozen, it wasn’t adhering to the cake. Tip 1- crumb coat a non-frozen cake.

Then I thought it would be brilliant to just microwave my white chocolate chips in its plastic bag, because who wants to melt it over the double boiler, then pour it into another zip lock bag to pipe it? It’d be a waste of white chocolate from all that transferring. Yeah, microwaving plastic isn’t the best, but let’s remember that I’m actually a rebel.

So, the white chocolate didn’t melt uniformly, and when I tried piping it out, it came out in globs instead of a thin smooth stream. I gave up on this idea and decided to work with it, and just smeared the white chocolate instead. Tip 2- they’re right, don’t microwave plastic. Bad things will happen, like globby chocolate.

 

I finished the cake before 2am, and my dad’s reaction the next morning when he was back was just, “oh. it’s matcha.”

And there we have it.

Happy birthday, dad. 🙂