Matcha Cookies with White Chocolate- Easy Green Tea Shortbread Cookies

Thesematcha cookies are shortbread cookies made with green tea. If you are a matcha lover, you will definitely love these matcha cookies.

With their crumbly, melt in the mouth texture, and intense green tea flavoring, these shortbread cookies will surely be the perfect cookies to make you happy!

These matcha shortbread cookies are very easy to make too. They are eggless and you only need 5 ingredients, including the white chocolate and the matcha powder, and the rest are butter, sugar and plain flour.

Shaping the matcha cookies is also easy and simple. You can roll and cut them with any cookie cutter, or simply roll and cut them into bars or squares like I did in my all butter shortbread bars recipe.

I choose to make these white chocolate matcha cookies with an intense green tea flavor because I wanted the green tea to be prominent in the cookies. And to match that, I added white chocolate centers and a pretty glaze drizzle. The white chocolate and the glaze icing complement the intense matcha flavor so perfectly well, making these the best matcha shortbread cookies!

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How to Make

Ingredients

• All purpose flour
• Butter
• White sugar (Granulated sugar & powdered sugar)
• Matcha powder
• White chocolate buttons or white chocolate chips

Mixing the cookie dough

Unlike the rubbing-in method I used to make my all butter shortbread bars, these green tea matcha cookie dough is mixed using the creaming method.

1. To begin with, add butter and sugar into a large bowl.
2. Beat both until the mixture turns creamy.
3. Measure the flour into a separate bowl and add the matcha powder to it.
4. Sift both the dry ingredients into the creamed butter and sugar mixture (wet ingredients).
5. To avoid the flour from flying, mix it into the creamed mixture with a spatula. Once the flour is blended in, you can use your mixer to mix it in thoroughly.
6. Turn it onto your work space and form into a ball.

Shaping the shortbread cookies

1. Divide the dough into smaller sections.
2. Roll it between 2 sheets of parchment paper.
3. For consistent thickness, use rolling pin guide rings or place 2 dowel rods on either side of the dough when rolling.
4. Cut the dough with a cookie cutter.

Adding the white chocolate centers to the green tea butter cookies

1. To lift the cookies, use a spatula or an icing scraper to scrape the dough up from the parchment paper. That way, you can lift the cookie easily without disfiguring them.
2. Neaten the cookie edges by pressing in any excess dough with your fingers.
3. Place the cookies on a baking sheet or lined baking tray. The cookies need not be spaced out too much. They do not rise or spread during baking, so it is ok to place them closely (give about at least 2cm to 3cm allowance. I placed mine further apart, but it's not necessary).
4. Place a white chocolate button in the center of each cookie and press it in lightly. This will cause the cookie dough to expand to the sides a little hence the need for the 2cm or 3cm gap between each cookie.

Baking and decorating

1. Bake cookies at 175 degrees Celsius oven temperature for about 6 minutes. Remove them from the oven and let them rest in the baking tray or cookie sheet for a few minutes before transferring them onto a cooling rack to cool completely to room temperature.
2. To make the icing, sift the powdered sugar into a bowl. It is important to sift it because any small lumps will make it hard to pipe the icing later, so don't skip this step. Add hot water to the icing sugar and stir until it becomes smooth. Transfer the icing into a piping bag (don't cut the tip yet). For easy transfer, place the piping bag into a glass and keep the top open by folding it over the tip of the glass.
3. Pour the glaze in, remove the piping bag from the glass, and secure the top. You can twist and hold it in place as you pipe the drizzle or you can twist a knot in the piping bag or use a clip to keep it closed. Snip the tip of the piping bag for a tiny hole. Try piping the glaze out. If you find it hard to pipe, cut a slightly bigger hole, and try again.
4. Place the baked shortbread cookies on a wire rack and drizzle the glaze in a zig-zag pattern on top of each cookie. Let the icing set completely before storing the matcha cookies.

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Notes

Butter

• I use salted butter in this white chocolate matcha cookies recipe. You can use unsalted butter if you like, but I find that the salt in the butter does give the shortbread cookies a little extra oomph. Also, this recipe will not work with melted butter.

Sugar

• This recipe calls for the use of granulated white sugar (castor sugar). You can also use icing sugar but not coarse sugar. Coarse sugar does not readily dissolve when creamed with butter, and your cookies will show the sugar granules after baking. The taste will be the same though, regardless of the size or the sugar granules.

Matcha powder and intensity of the flavor

• These shortbread cookies are flavored with matcha powder. Matcha powder is green tea leaves that have been processed really fine such that its consistency is similar to white flour. For best results, use culinary grade matcha or high quality Japanese green tea powder.
• The matcha white chocolate cookie recipe on this page produces intense green tea flavored cookies. This is intentional as I like the cookies to impart the unique flavor of strong green tea. Increasing the amount of green tea powder in the recipe will result in bitter taste to your cookies. If you prefer a lighter matcha flavoring, you can always reduce the green tea in the recipe by half or a quarter. In doing this, the shortbread cookies will not only have a less intense green tea flavor, the beautiful green color of the cookies will also be slightly lighter.

Mixing and rolling the dough

• This cookie dough is soft and can be a little sticky immediately after mixing. Letting it rest for about 5 to 10 minutes will make it easier to work with. Also, when rolling it out, placing the cookie dough in between 2 parchment sheets will help in avoiding the dough from sticking to the rolling pin.
• For a consistent thickness of these white chocolate matcha cookies, I use 2 dowel rods on either side of my cookie dough. That way, all my cookies turn out with a consistent thickness.

Shaping the cookies

• I used a simple flower cookie cutter to cut out my matcha shortbread cookies. The baked cookies measure 4.5cm in diameter (from petal to petal). For this cookie size, I was able to get 55 cookies from the recipe below. You can use any cookie cutter you like or you can even roll and cut the matcha cookie dough into squares or bars with a knife. The final yield will depend on the size of each cookie.
• Since the dough is a little soft, lifting the shortbread cookies after cutting, to the baking trays can be a little tricky. I use my icing scraper to lift my cookies. You can also use a flat spatula.

White chocolate buttons

• As you can see, my white chocolate matcha cookies are decorated with large white chocolate button centers. White chocolate complements green tea perfectly in these delicious cookies. I used compound chocolate in this recipe, and baking it changes the color of the white chocolate to a light brown. There is nothing wrong with this, as the taste remains the same. However, if you are someone who is picky about the chocolate turning a little brown, keep a close tab on the baking time.
• Also, do remember that if your matcha white chocolate cookies are thick, you would need to bake them longer. So, if the chocolate turning color is a concern for you, keep the thickness of the cookies to about ⅛ of an inch. That way, the cookies bake faster and that reduces the chances of the white chocolate centers turning color.

Storing the green tea shortbread cookies

• Let the sugar glaze drizzle set completely before storing these shortbread cookies in a cookie jar. Otherwise, the glaze will stick to one another.
• These white chocolate matcha cookies last well for a good 2 weeks. However, the glaze drizzle will start turning green (from the green tea in the cookies) after a few days. If you intend to store the cookies for long, it would best to store them without the sugar glaze. Drizzle the glaze when serving.
• Keep these shortbread cookies in an airtight container.

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Like this easy green tea cookies recipe? Here are my other posts you might want to check out

• Snowflakes Sugar Cookies
• No Spread Sugar Cookies
• Christmas Wreath Cookies
• Glaze Icing Recipe
• Matcha Pound Cake
• Matcha Ice Cream (Green Tea Ice Cream)
• Brown Sugar Shortbread - Quick and Easy Cut Out Cookies

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Recipe (Printable)

Here's the full printable version of my white chocolate matcha cookies recipe:

And that's that. My super yummy, white chocolate matcha cookies with white chocolate centers and pretty glaze drizzle.

Happy Baking and Decorating 🙂