Green tea ice cream... sort of!

Too sweet!

One of the nice things about living in Asia is easy access to green tea desserts. They have always been popular here in Hong Kong, but in the past few years vendors selling green tea soft serve ice cream have popped up everywhere in the city. You will see very long queues at these places paying pretty steep prices (US$5?) for a cone of green tea ice cream.

For a matcha addict like myself, it's nice to be able to slurp on matcha ice cream while hanging out, but they are invariably TOO sweet and rather stingy on the amount of matcha they put in. I want more green tea! (Well, some of my friends actually think they're matcha enough, but not for me!) Much better, then, to whip up your own icy matcha dessert! Since not everyone has an ice cream machine, I'm opting for a parfait which is in essence whipped egg yolks folded with whipped cream - similar to the Italian semifreddo. It is then frozen and usually sliced for serving. This frozen dessert is very popular in the UK and France but rarer in the US, where 'parfait' means some kind of layered dessert. This version as a pure, unadulterated matcha flavour unhindered by excessive sugar. It can be served as it is or as a component of plated desserts.

Homemade chocolate milk

En blanc et noir

If you grew up in Hong Kong as a kid in the 80's you must have seen this advert:

Like many Asian children, I was forced to drink milk every morning when I was little. I actually didn't mind it, although I knew many friends who absolutely hated it. That said, given the choice, I would have chocolate milk rather than 'plain' milk any day - and I'm sure I'm not alone here! Milk was tolerable, but chocolate milk was just yum.

I still remember how amazed I was when I had my first taste of English milk at 16 - only then did I realise that good milk could actually taste sweet, even grassy. The kind of white watery drink loaded with dry milk powder in Hong Kong obviously gave me the wrong impression of the drink. I became a convert, and chocolate milk gradually faded out from my life.

Since I'm subscribing to a herdshare programme with Highland Haven Farm, I receive 3 litres of milk each week. As much as I love my dairy, I usually have a hard time finishing the stuff unless I use most of it for dessert making. What I tend to do is turning the milk into different beverages:  usually milk tea and matcha latte. This week I have a whopping 6 litres of milk to finish, and I didn't want to repeat milk tea and matcha latte again, so I decided to give chocolate milk a shot. It turned out much better than I could have hoped for, and I think I'll be drinking the stuff every other day for the rest of my life. Incidentally, research shows that downing chocolate milk after a tough workout can help replenish exhausted muscles and significantly aid exercise recovery. Plenty of reasons to consume gallons of chocolate milk every day!