Matcha Tea Cake

The oven number, 170°C static, matters more than it looks. Fan ovens push hot air hard across the surface and will catch the outside of a tall, dense batter like this before the centre's had a chance to set — so if yours is fan-only, drop it by about 20 degrees as a rule of thumb, not a guess, and check the skewer earlier rather than trust the clock. Sixty minutes is the lower bound here, not the answer. A pound-cake ratio like this is heavy and wet relative to a sponge, so it needs the long, gentle bake to cook through without a dry crust forming on top first. The skewer test exists precisely because ovens lie — every one runs a little hot or cold, and a cake this dense can look done on top and still be batter two centimetres down.

Butter: you want one with no strong character of its own beyond "butter" — nothing cultured or heavily salted, because its job is structure and a background richness, not flavour competition with the matcha. Unsalted is the safer default; if you've only got salted, that's fine, just don't add extra salt elsewhere, there isn't any in this recipe to begin with.

Sugar: caster, specifically, because the fine grain dissolves into the butter during creaming instead of sitting there as grit. Granulated will work in a pinch but you'll beat for longer and still feel the odd crystal on your tongue — not a disaster, just a texture tell.

Eggs: room temperature isn't a ritual, it's about emulsion. Cold eggs hitting warm creamed butter can make the mixture split — curdle, basically — because fat and water-based egg don't want to mix easily when there's a temperature shock involved. If it does split a little, don't panic, a spoonful of the flour beaten in will usually bring it back together; the flour's starch acts as a buffer between the fat and the water.

Flour: plain, not self-raising, because you're controlling the rise yourself with measured baking powder — self-raising already has its own amount baked in and you'd end up either flat or over-risen and craggy on top. Sift it; this cake has no other leavening help beyond the powder and the air you beat in, so lumps of flour are lumps that never fully hydrate and leave streaks in the crumb.

Baking powder: 16g against 250g flour is a generous but not reckless ratio — enough to lift a dense batter, not so much that it tastes metallic or makes the top collapse after it's over-expanded. If yours has sat in the cupboard since last Christmas, test it in a cup of warm water first — it should fizz energetically. Flat fizz means flat cake.

Matcha: culinary-grade matcha, not the ceremonial stuff meant for drinking straight — ceremonial grade is expensive and delicate in flavour, which gets lost once you bake it; culinary grade is made for exactly this, holding its colour and slightly grassy bitterness through heat. If you can't get matcha at all, you haven't really got a substitute that keeps the name — a strong-brewed, finely ground green tea can approximate the colour and bitterness but won't have the same smoothness, since matcha is the whole leaf ground fine, not an infusion.

Vanilla: the pod gives you both flavour and those little black flecks that tell you it's real vanilla, not an essence from a bottle. No pod, use a good teaspoon of vanilla extract — not "flavouring", which is usually vanillin made in a lab and tastes thinner and more one-note.

Tin: 22cm is wide enough and shallow enough for a 170°C oven to reach the centre in that hour without the edges drying out first — go smaller and the middle stays wet when the outside's already dark; go bigger and it'll bake faster than the time given, so start checking it sooner. Damp, wrung-out paper moulds into the corners of the tin better than dry paper, which just fights you and springs back.

And patience — real patience, not the thirty seconds before you reach for a knife — matters twice here. Once while the cake cools on a rack before you unmould it fully, because a warm pound cake is still structurally soft and will tear or sink in the middle if you rush it out of the tin. And once again before that first beating, letting butter actually come up to room temperature rather than microwaving it halfway there, which softens the outside and leaves a cold core that won't cream properly at all.