I usually don’t like fruit and tea mixed together and prefer to keep them separated at all times. However, the one exception to this rule is a good matcha strawberry latte–specifically one from Boba Guys, Boba Bliss, or Teaspoon. I dunno why it’s so good but whoever birthed the idea is a genius who ought to be thanked for their beneficial contribution to mankind.

If matcha + red bean was the classic power couple, matcha + strawberry would be the Gen Z power couple. Uhh… like comparing Barack and Michelle Obama to Zendaya and Tom Holland.

Yeah, I dunno what I’m talking about here either.

…Anyway, when I saw someone I follow on Instagram post cookies with that flavor combination, I added that cookie to my bucket list. Another addition to my holiday gift box to the mentors/leaders in my life, I made matcha strawberry cookies, using the recipe from the blog, Constellation Inspiration.

A Rant on Sugar Cookies

Since baking four different types of cookies over the past two weeks, one thing I’ve been noticing for a lot of these cookie recipes is that a lot of them have the same base recipe. Like seriously, it’s just a sugar cookie with some sort of twist. For example, take a look at the last two cookies I’ve made:

Gochujang caramel: Sugar cookie with some gochujang

Oolong sugar cookies: Sugar cookie with some oolong butter rolled in oolong sugar

Cookies are so customizable. I can see why it’s a universal idea to make cookies as gifts—you’re making the same recipe with slightly different tweaks in, like, five different ways.

The part where I talk about the titular cookies

Anyway, I’m going to skip the nitty gritty details of putting together this dough and note some key things that I had to do make this dough.

Before making this dough, I had to grind up some freeze dried strawberries that I ended up buying from Target. Y’all, freeze dried fruit from Target is sorta pricey but when not one but two of your local TJ’s disappoints you (who’s eating all the freeze dried strawberries? are you making these cookies too???), you don’t get a choice. After grinding it to dust and subsequently choking/sneezing after getting a good inhale of pink smoke upon removing the lid of my food processor, I moved onto making my basic sugar cooke dough.

After making the dough, I divided it into roughly three portions–one for original, one for matcha, and one for strawberry. In one portion, I stirred in two tablespoons of matcha. In another portion, I stirred in some freeze dried strawberry powder. I realized, as I’m adding something that is technically dry ingredients, it was pretty hard to mix in the additions into the dough portions to a uniform dough and eventually resorted to the two hand/spoon method to get the job done.

Following the recipe’s instructions, I took roughly a tbsp of each dough, rolling each into an individual ball and then rolling it into one giant tri-colored ball, followed by rolling the giant ball in some sugar. As, I took a tbsp of each dough, I quickly developed the gut feeling, “oh these cookies are gonna be big.” Maybe instinctively, as I produced my tri-colored cookie balls, I gradually used less dough. I also noticed that I was running out of the original dough portion much more quickly than the other two portions. Soon, I was trying to ration the original dough.

Anyway, so instead of making 12 cookies, I made 15 cookies, with the last one being very heavily strawberry with specks of matcha. Looking at the pink and green polka dots on that cookie made me realize and appreciate that the original sugar portion adds contrast and balances out the otherwise weird colors on a cookie.

After baking them, one thing I immediately noticed what that these cookies expanded a lot, especially the original cookie part–which I quickly chalked up to the fact that this was the one portion where we didn’t add more dry ingredients to. Some cookies expanded so much that they ended up squooshing into each others, creating very non-circular cookies with a very obvious horizontal edge where the cookies fused.

But the color looked pretty gorgeous. I liked the contrast between the pink, green, and white, even if there was more emphasis on one color, versus another. The taste was also not too bad either. In one bite, I can taste both the strawberries and the matcha pretty clearly. The flavors compliment each other well, even in the cookie form. It became a fun twist alternative if I didn’t feel like getting a drink, a nice homage to the drink that I enjoyed so much.

The only change I would make to these cookies would be to scoop maybe 1/2 tbsp, instead of 1 tbsp of each dough to make smaller cookies (or at least, not as giant) or add an equivalent (to matcha and strawberry powder) amount of flour to make sure that each portion would expand and bake the same way.

Overall, these cookies were pretty fun to make and turned out pretty decently. They were good enough to consider making these again sometime.

It felt really good to try making something for the objective of trying to love other people. It helped me get out of my own head and provided a much welcomed/needed distraction in my life when I really needed it.

Life’s hard sometimes but at least, matcha strawberry lattes/cookies and friends are in it with you.