Live from my household/prison, I give you this matcha cookie recipe. I call this “quarantine baking” or “quarantine boredom” or simply just finding ways to use up my leftover black sesame powder and matcha powder in my cupboard. My whole family is home, and a full house means that the kitchen is almost always occupied. With people, dirty dishes, and dirty utensils. When I have the kitchen to myself, I find it my sanctuary, where I spend my days being creative through baked goods, and simply just executing experiments with baked goods and different desserts, while trying out different flavours.

However, when everyone is home and it stays dirty, cluttered, and everything gets misplaced, it goes from my sanctuary to my worst nightmare — the source of all stress. I am constantly too distracted with cleaning up other people’s messes and lecturing family members, or even just chatting with siblings to get into my zone. So lately, I’ve had to put off a lot of cake baking and cake decorating videos during this time. Sadly. I’m eagerly awaiting for society to go back to it’s original state but I’m definitely not taking this period of social distancing lightly.

I’m taking it so seriously, in fact, that I’ve not seen my fiancé for over 2-3 weeks. This is a long time considering we used to basically live at each other’s places for half of the weeks at a time. We’ve been doing our Catholic church marriage prep courses online and I have ALL the workbooks/journals so I fill everything out for the both of us. The only thing getting me through this period of time is thinking about this whole thing as some temporary distance until we can finally be together FOREVER and EVER. Romantic, right? Yeah, I’ve been watching an unhealthy amount of Korean Drama shows, and it’s got me quite into this hopeless romantic mood. Anyone else binging Crash Landing on You?

Anyways, since I had my whole family home, I was craving some comfort food, and by comfort food I mean cookies. Cookies = comfort. I tried to go a slightly healthier route before caving in and baking off three batches of super buttery/sugary, crisp-edged, chewy chocolate chip cookies and devouring about 1/2 a dozen (or more) a day. Is it a problem? Maybe. I think I’m just going to continue listening to my body and trying to comfort myself while also remembering to keep balance. I’m still making sure the rest of my meals are well-balanced, while doing at-home workouts everyday. Don’t @ me for eating so many cookies.

As I was saying before I went off on a tangent about those delicious chocolate chip cookies, I tried to go a slightly healthier route and use up some leftover matcha powder and sesame powder and turn it into a cookie. The cookies itself are actually dairy free, made with coconut oil and coconut milk, with the addition of matcha powder. This doesn’t necessarily mean that it is healthier, as it does use white flour, and white sugar, but it is a good alternative to those who cannot have dairy. I needed a way to use up some of my left over black sesame powder, so I ended up making some white chocolate black sesame ganache from a previous recipe to dip my cookies in. I figured this would be the best way to decorate my cookies and add a little extra flavour. Needless to say, I made about 20 cookies and they were all gone by the end of the day.

Here is the recipe and the video tutorial below.