Matcha Shortbread Cookies

I took a beak from blogging since it's been pretty cloudy here most days and I hate taking pictures when it's this cloudy. I'm really not pleased with the way the pictures came out for all my dinners that I shot at night. So I've decided I'm only going to shoot for the blog when I cook lunch. Baking is not much of an issue because baked goods still taste good hours after being made. So I could bake something during daylight hours and take pictures when it's still light outside and enjoy it fresh come dinner time.
There was one opportunity that I could have cooked lunch on (days that Brian works from home) and it was bright and sunny out too but some online grocery delivery service (I'm looking at you Good Eggs) was late so I couldn't make lunch that day and hence couldn't take pictures.

Anyway, enough with my whining. Lets talk about these cookies.

I made these matcha cookies to go along with a St. Patrick's Day dinner. The green coloring on the cookies were just too good to be missed and since I LOVE the flavor of matcha, I knew what dessert I'd make for dinner. These are pretty easy to make and make quite a lot of small cookies. You could use a larger cookie cutter and use your judgement to figure out how long to bake them if you wanted larger cookies. I kind of like the fun of eating a bunch of smaller ones :)

Recipe on my own from working on a couple of online recipes I found
Makes about 3 dozen cookies

Ingredients:
140 gm flour (1 cup)
15 gm matcha (2 tbsp)
65 gm powdered sugar (1/2 cup)
115 gm room temp butter (1/2 cup, 1 stick)
1 tsp vanilla extract
Optional chocolate coating:
80 gm milk chocolate chips (1/2 cup)
1/2 tsp vegetable oil

Instructions:
Preheat oven to 350 F. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper.
Sift the dry ingredients together in a medium bowl (flour. matcha, and powdered sugar). Add butter ad mix by hand till it forms a rough dough (don't over knead or the cookies will be tough). If you don't want to take  chance with tough cookies, alternately cream together the butter and sugar and add the sifted ingredients and fold it in till it forms a rough dough.
Turn out the dough onto a long piece of parchment paper and top with another long piece of parchment paper. Roll it to 1/4" thickness using a rolling pin and cut out cookies using a 1.5" cookie cutter. Bake for about 9 minutes or until they seem slightly golden (it is kind of hard to tell with the green coloring). Make sure to not overtake though. Slightly less baked is better than over-baked. Cool the cookies completely.
For the optional chocolate coating, in the meantime melt chocolate and oil together using double boiler method or a microwave (I used microwave). Once the cookies have cooled completely, dip half of each cookie into the chocolate mixture and allow to to set on a parchment paper. Once completely set (about an hour or two depending on the room temp), pack them in airtight bags/containers.