Matcha Christmas cookies with white chocolate

Matcha and white chocolate work the way dark chocolate and sea salt work. One side is bitter, grassy and a little savoury; the other is sugar and cocoa butter with nothing much to say for itself. Together both improve. That is the whole idea behind matcha Christmas cookies, and it is why they disappear off the plate before the gingerbread does.

The hard part is not the dough, it is the colour. Matcha is green because of chlorophyll, and chlorophyll gives up fast: olive at high heat, drab in an alkaline batter. Below: three recipes in grams, the oven settings that hold the green, and what a batch costs.

Why white chocolate and not dark

Dark chocolate and matcha both bring bitterness, and the two fight. White chocolate brings none — cocoa butter, sugar and milk solids, which is the padding matcha needs. The fat carries the tea flavour across the tongue; the sugar sits underneath the astringency rather than on top of it.

It also behaves better: it sets flat and slightly glossy and holds pistachios or freeze-dried raspberry. Use a bar with at least 28 % cocoa butter — cheap coating chocolate seizes into grains the moment it touches a warm cookie.

One thing to know first: matcha is tea, so these are not caffeine-free. Each cookie holds a quarter of a gram of matcha, roughly 5–11 mg of caffeine — worth remembering if a child eats six before dinner.

Matcha shortbread with white chocolate — the recipe

Makes 24 · 25 minutes of work + 1 hour chilling · oven 160 °C conventional (145 °C fan)

Dough: 150 g soft unsalted butter · 70 g icing sugar · 200 g plain flour · 30 g cornflour · 6 g matcha (Sakuro Matcha Finest) · 2 g fine salt · 5 ml vanilla extract.
To finish: 100 g white chocolate · 20 g chopped pistachios or freeze-dried raspberries.

1. Sift the flour, cornflour, matcha and salt together — then sift again. Matcha compacts like cocoa, and a lump that reaches the dough bakes into a bitter green dot.
2. Beat the butter with the icing sugar for two minutes, until pale. Do not whip air into it; shortbread wants to be dense.
3. Add the vanilla, then the dry mix in two goes. Stop the moment it clumps together — overworking is what makes shortbread tough.
4. Roll the dough into a log about 4.5 cm across, wrap it, and chill one hour in the fridge or 20 minutes in the freezer. Cold dough keeps its edge; warm dough spreads into blobs.
5. Heat the oven to 160 °C (fan 145 °C). Slice 8 mm discs and set them 3 cm apart on lined trays.
6. Bake 12–14 minutes. They should come out looking underbaked, matt on top, with no browning at the edges at all. They firm up as they cool.
7. Five minutes on the tray, then a rack until completely cold. Chocolate on a warm cookie will not set.
8. Melt the white chocolate over hot — not boiling — water and take it off at about 45 °C. Dip each cookie halfway, scrape the underside on the rim, lay it on paper and scatter pistachios while the chocolate is wet. Thirty minutes to set.

If the dough cracks as you slice it, the log is too cold; five minutes on the counter fixes that. If the discs come out oval, roll the log a quarter turn between cuts.

Five rules that keep them green

Keep the oven at 160 °C. Above roughly 175 °C the surface starts to brown and the green greys out with it. The cookie ends up tasting toasted instead of grassy.

Baking powder, never bicarbonate of soda. Alkaline dough dulls matcha to olive within minutes of mixing. If a recipe calls for soda, use three times as much baking powder instead.

Matcha goes in with the dry ingredients. Stirred into melted butter it clumps; dissolved in hot liquid it cooks twice. Sifted into the flour, nowhere else.

Open a fresh tin. Matcha oxidises once opened. A half-used tin that has stood on the shelf since spring is already yellowing, and no oven discipline brings it back.

Store them in a tin, in the dark. Light fades the colour faster than time does. Airtight, the shortbread holds colour and snap for about ten days.

Two more cookies for the Christmas tin

Matcha crinkle cookies are the showy ones: soft inside, cracked white top, 20 to a batch. Whisk 1 egg with 100 g caster sugar, add 60 g melted and cooled butter, then fold in 180 g flour sifted with 8 g matcha, 5 g baking powder and 2 g salt, plus 80 g white chocolate chips. Chill an hour; the dough is sticky and has to be. Roll 30 g balls through caster sugar, then a thick coat of icing sugar, and bake at 170 °C (fan 155 °C) for 10–11 minutes. The double coating is what makes the cracks white instead of green.

Matcha thumbprints with white chocolate ganache look like small wreaths and keep five days. Use 5 g matcha, 190 g flour, 130 g butter, 60 g icing sugar, an egg yolk and 2 g salt. Roll 20 g balls, press a dent with the end of a wooden spoon, bake 13 minutes at 160 °C and press the dent again as they come out. For the ganache, pour 40 ml hot cream over 100 g chopped white chocolate, wait two minutes, stir smooth, cool ten minutes and spoon it in. White chocolate needs that 100:40 ratio — at the usual 1:1 you get sauce, not filling.

Cookie	Matcha	Flour	Matcha per 100 g flour	Makes	Oven
Shortbread, dipped in white chocolate	6 g	230 g (200 g + 30 g cornflour)	2.6 g	24	160 °C / fan 145 °C, 12–14 min
Crinkle cookies	8 g	180 g	4.4 g	20	170 °C / fan 155 °C, 10–11 min
Thumbprints with ganache	5 g	190 g	2.6 g	18	160 °C / fan 145 °C, 13 min

The crinkles carry nearly twice the matcha per 100 g of flour, and they need it — the sugar coating and soft crumb swallow a lot of flavour. In shortbread, 2.6 g per 100 g is where the tea is clearly there and the butter still tastes of butter.

Which matcha, and what a batch costs

You do not need a culinary grade, and in Sakuro’s case there is none — both tins are ceremonial Japanese matcha from Shizuoka. Sakuro Matcha Finest 40 g at €23.90 is the one to bake with: a touch more astringent, an advantage once sugar and butter get involved. Sakuro Matcha Excellence 40 g at €26.90 is rounder and sweeter — keep that for the bowl.

Matcha	Tin	Price	Per gram	6 g per batch	Per cookie (24)
Sakuro Matcha Finest	40 g	€23.90	€0.60	€3.59	€0.15
Sakuro Matcha Excellence	40 g	€26.90	€0.67	€4.04	€0.17

Fifteen cents of matcha per cookie, then — less than the butter, far less than the white chocolate. One 40 g tin covers six batches of shortbread, which is most of a December. Prices checked on yerbador.com on 13 November 2026. Baking for a café or a Christmas market rather than a kitchen table? The same matcha ships in 1 kg bags at roughly €109/kg net for Finest and €157/kg for Excellence — an indicative conversion at the NBP rate of 13 November 2026 (1 € = 4.4070 zł) — and the binding offer comes from Ewelina at [email protected] or +48 515 025 329.

What to drink with them

Coffee flattens matcha. Tea against tea works better: whisk 2 g of matcha with 40 ml of water at 70–80 °C until it foams, pour in 180 ml of hot milk or oat drink, and dust cinnamon over the top. A bamboo chasen at €14.90 gets the lumps out in a way a fork never quite does.

Packing them as a gift

Shortbread travels; crinkles do not. Crinkles go soft against anything crisp, so give them their own layer. Baking paper between layers, the tin filled to the top so nothing rattles, and nothing warm going in.

Keeping times: shortbread 10–14 days airtight, thumbprints with ganache five days somewhere cool, crinkles three to four. The raw log freezes for three months: slice straight from frozen, add two minutes in the oven. The most useful line on this page when people turn up unannounced.

If the cookies go down well, the obvious present is the ingredient. A tin of Sakuro Matcha Finest is €23.90; the Matcha Finest set with a Hisui bowl — tin, bowl, whisk and scoop in a box — is €55.90. Both ship from inside the EU, which in the second week of December is not a small detail.

Questions people ask about matcha Christmas cookies

Which matcha should I bake with?

A green one. Colour is the honest signal: vivid green powder means shade-grown leaf picked young, and that is what survives the oven. Grey-green or yellowish powder bakes to the colour of dried herbs. Between the two Sakuro tins, Finest is the baking one.

Why did my matcha cookies turn khaki?

Almost always the oven. At 180 °C the surface browns and the green goes with it — drop to 160 °C and add two minutes. The other suspect is bicarbonate of soda, which turns the dough alkaline and dulls the colour before the tray goes in.

Can I freeze the dough?

Yes, and for shortbread it is the better way to work. Roll the log, wrap twice, freeze up to three months, slice frozen and bake at 160 °C for 14–16 minutes. Crinkle dough freezes as balls, but sugar them after thawing — sugar on frozen dough dissolves into a sticky glaze.

How much caffeine is in one cookie?

Roughly 5–11 mg. Six grams of matcha across 24 cookies is a quarter of a gram each, and matcha carries about 18.9–44.4 mg of caffeine per gram (Molecules, 2021). For scale, EFSA considers 400 mg a day acceptable for most adults and 200 mg in pregnancy.

Can I make them dairy-free?

The shortbread, yes: a firm plant block of around 80 % fat, not a soft spread, and half an hour longer in the fridge. The chocolate is harder — ordinary white bars contain milk solids, so you need a vegan one, and those set softer. Dip at 40 °C and firm them up in the fridge.