Potluck Experiments: 抹茶マーブルシフォン (Matcha Marbled Chiffon Cake)

As part of my post-hurricane potluck baking experiments, I decided that I wanted to try baking a nice cake made with green tea.  I had bought some good quality matcha (a type of Japanese green tea) powder from Amazon and so far I'd only made desserts using green tea cream.  Why not bake a nice cake with matcha instead?

American baked desserts are notably sweeter than baked desserts in Japan.  I like the flavor of matcha in a dessert but it really does taste weird when the dessert is at American levels of sweetness.  My parents have mentioned that one of the things they had a hard time adjusting to when we lived in Japan was that the cakes were not sweet in the way that they were expecting.  I ended up with the opposite reaction: Japanese-style cakes that are made to American sweetness levels don't taste right.

All of the recipes I found that looked promising for matcha cakes were in Japanese.  I couldn't find English translations (or I couldn't figure out the right phrases to google).  Eventually I ended up using google translate and my horrible Japanese to translate several recipes that looked promising.

The Japanese was not the most difficult part of translating the recipes - the different measurement systems were.  Most Americans don't know that we're the odd man out when it comes to cooking measurements, and it's not Imperial versus metric.  Almost every other country (except Australia) uses weight or mass when measuring dry ingredients, but we use volume.

Unfortunately, it's a bit more complicated than that.  Liquid ingredients are generally measured by volume in most countries but with a different measuring system than in the US.  Most dry or bulky ingredients are measured by weight or mass instead of volume.

The worst problem is converting from US to Imperial (UK) or vice versa, where we use the same words but mean different amounts.  This is why we can have ounces of milk and ounces of butter in the US and mean two completely separate measurements.  Fluid ounces are not the same thing as solid ounces.  This is also why you can't buy a cookbook in England and use it back in the US.  I've got a UK version of one of Nigella Lawson's cookbooks and I ended up buying another US copy of it because it was easier than converting every single recipe.

There are different conversions for each ingredient.  One cup of milk and one cup of flour do not have the same weight.  If you do end up having to translate a recipe, make sure that you look up the conversions for each ingredient.  Don't use the conversion for flour when you are calculating the amount of sugar!

If you scroll down this page to the baking conversions, you'll see exactly what I'm talking about.