Green Tea Cake for the GEC Potluck

Green Tea cake is one of my favorite recipes, and due to positive feedback it seems to be one of my friends' favorites as well :) This is basically a recipe for vanilla cake with added matcha (green tea extract that I blogged about in an earlier post). It's a fairly simple recipe if you have matcha. It's a really yummy cake, sweet with a little something extra, and the matcha turns the cake and frosting a pretty green color. It's a kinda unique and fun dessert, so it's one that I like to make and bring to events. 

This time around I made a cake for a Green Events Commission (GEC) potluck. The GEC is a student group I'm part of at Wash U. We provide free sustainable consulting services to other student groups on campus. This is my third year as a member, and I absolutely love being able to make a difference on campus this way! It's also a fun team to be apart of. This weekend we had a potluck dinner, to do some low stress bonding outside of meetings. It was such a success and so fun! Also since many GEC members are vegetarian (and vegetarianism has a smaller carbon footprint > see my super long flexitarian post if you want to learn more), the potluck was completely vegetarian fair! My contributions were Spinach Rolls (which also have their own post) and a special GEC Green Tea Cake. I decided to experiment with cake decorating by recreating the GEC logo on the cake in frosting. For a first attempt, it turned out well. My lettering was kinda messy, but I think that will get better with practice. The complete frosting process is pictured below.

This is what our actual logo looks like

 Thoughts on this Dessert:

• Firstly, I've had several requests for the recipe for this cake so here it is:
• 1 box of vanilla cake mix and what other ingredients the cake box recipe call for (I think its 2 eggs, half a cup of water and 1/4 a cup of vegetable oil)
• 5 packs of matcha
• 1 box of vanilla instant pudding
• 1 container of vanilla frosting
• You basically follow the directions on the cake mix box, and add the pudding. Then mix in 3 packs of matcha once the cake mix is stirred. The bake time for this recipe varies a lot. It tends to take longer than the bake time on the box, so check the cake at 5-7 minute intervals until the middle is completely done. Wait till cool to frost. The frosting is made by just stirring 2 packs of matcha into a tub of vanilla frosting. Make sure it is well mixed!!
• This time there was some extra batter so we made cupcakes as well. I left those at home.
• Matcha is the only ingredient of this recipe that is a bit hard to get ahold of. I suggest greenmax brand, which is sold on Amazon. For more details see my Matcha Tea post.
• This is one of my favorite recipes and I've made it enough times that I can consistently make a yummy and gorgeous cake.

Everyone really liked the cake, and had an awesome time at the potluck. It makes me so happy that I can make something that is new to so many people, and they really like it!