Hooray for new and exciting tea infused cooking!
We had a staff meeting/potluck at DAVIDsTEA yesterday so I decided that in addition to the tea eggs I was bringing, I’d try my hand at doing a “Matcha Brittle” so I was also bring a Vegan friendly option ’cause I know like three of my coworkers are vegan. Plus, dessert!
The recipe I used was an altered one which was originally supposed to make hibiscus brittle; but who wants hibiscus brittle!? Yuck. So instead I just swapped out the ground hibiscus for matcha instead. This was my first time making a brittle, and I have to say that I’m definitely going to need to try the recipe a few more times to perfect it ‘cause I did something wrong and my brittle didn’t completely set. It did harden to the point where I could shatter it, but it’s stayed quite sticky despite that and when I moved it into a plastic tupperware container to transport to work all of the shards kind of melded together. So it wasn’t a total success. I wonder if maybe that’s because instead of regular white sugar I had to crush down sugar cubes (it was the only sugar I had) so the texture/melting point of the sugar MAY have been affected?
That said, while this isn’t the prettiest brittle (it’s kind of vomit green), it does TASTE really good. It’s a lovely mix of sweet candy notes/champagne and semi acidic lemon (the brittle is lemon infused as well) in addition to lots of floral and grassy notes from the matcha. I was worried the champagne flavour wouldn’t come through alongside the matcha/sugar but it does, and it’s really lovely. Even though it’s a bitch to break off a piece, I keep coming back to the rest of it because it’s so yummy. It’s a great balance of sweet sugary candy/champagne and grassy matcha.
And everyone at the potluck seemed to like it too, other than the damn stickiness/chewiness of it. That was sort of a bitch.
Trial and error, for sure.
Also; I was eating some on the bus to work this morning and I shit you not I was actually accused of eating ‘edibles’ (put infused candy) because of how gnarly the appearance of the brittle is. No pretty jade greens for this candy…
