Green Tea Cake Roll Recipe

Cake rolls, as the name implies, are cakes that are spread with jelly or buttercream and then rolled into logs. The French name is roulade. For this recipe, I decided to use matcha green tea because of its very delicate flavor. It also gives the cake (called génoise in French) a beautiful jade green color. I filled and covered the cake with vanilla butter-cream and kept the flavors appropriately Zen in their simplicity.

Matcha green tea is fairly expensive and has a very short shelf life, so once the box is unsealed, consume it fast. Enjoy it as is with hot water or flavor your favorite desserts with the green tea powder. I had a little less than one tablespoon left in the tin. I think I had made pretty good use of it with desserts such as Vietnamese agar agar desserts, tea lattés, crème brulées and ice cream.

Chestnut Crumb Coffee Cake

For brunch, the girls and I made a crumb coffee cake flavored with chestnut purée, and a streusel topping made with cinnamon and brown sugar for a rich, caramel flavor. Buttermilk gives a moist texture to the coffee cake; the result was just divine. Chestnut may not be a common flavor for coffee cake, but I guarantee that after tasting it, you'll be hooked.

I served the coffee cake with a big pot of masala chai. We all enjoyed ourselves. Hope your weekend is as relaxing and peaceful as ours!

Apple Bread Pudding

This recipe calls for all the usual suspects that are found in bread pudding, namely sugar, milk, fresh or dried fruits and some dry bread cubes. I made my apple raisin bread pudding using stale bread that has been sitting on the kitchen counter. The dryness of stale bread is actually an asset in preparing bread pudding, because the dry bread will soak up a good deal of flavor. If you buy a lot of bread and sometimes don't use all of it, this recipe might be helpful for you. It was amazing how fast these little mini loaves of bread pudding disappeared!

Bread pudding to me is a perfect breakfast food, similar to pain perdu, or French toast. I also often enjoy it for le goûter de 4 heures, which in English translates to "4 p.m. snack". As a child, this was my favorite time of the day! My childhood memory of a typical "4 heures" would be a piece of warm baguette with a piece of chocolate, an apple and chocolate milk. If you ask any French kid, that's pretty normal but it doesn't seem to be this way in America. The juice box and supermarket candy bar that most American kids eat (including my little sisters-in-law), definitely don't compare.