Matcha + Strawberry Chiffon Cake
Giving vanilla cake, a bit o' a face lift here!
hey hi hello!
Glad to have ya back! Or maybe it’s your first time here- then welcome to bake chats. You’re in for a treat because today we are back with another round of recipe riffin’. A little insight into how I bake freely and with expression in my “home” kitchen. “Home” because, still don’t have a working oven at home, but, have commandeered my best friends kitchen in the meantime- say thanks Nette!
At the start of 2025 I had set out on what I was calling “matcha exposure therapy”- which is just me, forcing myself to like matcha. WOO! I’ve always liked the idea of matcha as an alternative to coffee, just never a huge fan on the flavor. Whatever, so I got really into making my own matchas every morning. Playing around with syrups and milks, temps and ratios until I started to like matcha, not just as I make it but as a whole. One of my favorite combos (and also just like a favorite of everyone…) is strawberry matcha. A brand had reached out for some strawberry matcha UGC cake content so now, we’re gonna turn my new found love of matcha into a cake.
Let’s get this show on the road!
In addition to solid base recipes + basic understanding of what your ingredients do in a recipe. You also *sometimes* need a formula to follow. If you haven’t noticed by now, I make a lot of layered cakes. I would say 90% of those cakes follow the same formula. Which helps me to plug and play with flavors with ease. My layer cakes are *almost* always comprised of:
Soft and airy layers of sponge cake, usually a chiffon
A complementary soak- not just simple syrup okay and not to moisten a dry cake- NEVER THAT. This is another spot for you to bring more flavor ya know.
Creamy filling(s)- Curds, pastry creams, light as air mousses, you get the vibe
Buttercream- ideal for the style of decorating I do, but if the cake is “just” for eatin’ then I’m going whipped cream finish every single time!!
Variable: sometimes will throw chunks of fruit or a layer of jam in, if that’s the flavor vibe I’m going for. I’m not usually a crunchies in my cake girl, aside from like the seed of a passion fruit.
My ideal cake is ultra soft and melts in your mouth- which is what I get when I follow this formula. Your formula can and will look different based on what you like in a cake! Right, cake isn’t one size fits all!
The very “blank” slate of this formula is:
Vanilla chiffon cake (I have two recipes for chiffon. One is a pretty classic oil based chiffon and the second is my hybrid butter chiffon which was developed to be sturdier for stacking and layering)
Sweet milk soak: A little milk, with sugar and vanilla to taste, nothing crazy
Vanilla pastry cream: Sometimes as is, straight PC. But, more often than not I’m folding in some whipped cream to make a creme légère (bavarian if I stabilize with gelatin too)
From here we infuse and flavor each component, based on what you want your new cake to be. As I play around and shuffle the flavors that are currently inspiring me throughout the formula- I think about what flavors I want at the fore front and which are more supporting roles. This helps to decide what goes where and how. Typically a supporting flavor will end up in the soak or buttercream while the stars are the filling and the cake layers.
MATCHA CHIFFON: I use my olive oil chiffon cake recipe as the starting point. When it comes to making swaps and additions in a recipe for flavor, something I’m always think about is how this new ingredients “acts” and what it would be replacing- if anything at all. That’s what guides how I treat the ingredient and informs any other changes that might need to happen within the recipe to make things go smoothly as I riff.
In the case of matcha for the chiffon- I’m adding about 2 tablespoons + 1 teaspoon of matcha powder to batter . It isn’t replacing 2 tablespoons of flour, because it doesn’t act like flour. Matcha won’t provide the cake with any structure. But, I do add a little extra water and a touch more sugar to counter the fact that the matcha will absorb a little bit of the liquid in the recipe, it’s not some crazy substantial amount, but, I’d rather not risk it drying out the cake. Matcha, alone is also bitter, adding literally 10 grams of brown sugar to the recipe will mellow it out, without changing the structure too much, if anything it helps to make a softer sponge. Because remember, sugar=texture, not just sweet.
I treat the matcha how I would cocoa powder, meaning I bloom it with 165F water to bring out some of the more desirable matcha notes. From there, I move through the recipe exactly how I would any other day, add the rest of the wet ingredients, whip the whites, add the dries to the wets, and fold in the whites. Give that 5 big booms.
MATCHA SOAK: I could have gone two routes here (actually, like maybe 100 different routes, but these are the two I thought about okay!!), make a matcha milk soak (matcha latte), which I did. Or, take the juice from the macerated strawberries and use that to soak the cake layers. Because, sometimes another component will make the soak for you. Poaching, roasting and macerating fruits all like you with a flavor packed syrup you can use to add more depth to a cake. Ultimately I saved the syrup for future lattes and lemonades and doubled down on the matcha.
To make the matcha soak, I just, make a matcha latte, just as I would drink it but now it’s for soaking.
STRAWBERRY CREME LEGERE: I find making pastry cream with fresh strawberries can be too variable based on the quality and ripeness of your berries. I had used fresh strawberries for the first version of this custard and aside from having too faint of a strawberry flavor it also turned a kinda putrid shade of purple. Which happens when you cook strawberries. Usually a little hit of acid helps to maintain the color but, acid + heat can curdle milk and I didn’t want to risk it. Round two of the pastry cream I opted for using freeze dried strawberries to get a more concentrated berry flavor in the custard. Since the FD berries soak up a decent amount of liquid so to offset that I added a few extra splashes of milk.
I think pastry cream in between cake layers is fine, but I prefer a softer, slightly whipped filling. So I’m almost always folding stiff whipped cream into my custards. The amount of heavy cream I use varies between 30-50% the weight of the pastry cream used. Things I consider when deciding how much cream to use? The current flavor of the pastry cream, if its lighter in flavor I don’t want to muddle things down more with a ton of heavy cream. Sometimes, when riffing on the PC recipe you might have a custard that ends up stiffer or a little looser than your baseline. So, if the custard is thicker I tend to use less heavy cream than if it’s on the thinner side. If that’s the case I’m using a lot more whipped cream to keep things stable.