Matcha mousse, chocolate stout pudding and baked figs: More cupboard clear outs

After making matcha cookies a while ago, I still had a good bit of matcha left and no real idea what to do with it.

With a house move in the offing, I've got to try and get rid of all the bits and pieces cluttering up my cupboards. I decided that matcha was a prime candidate for the clear out!

But what do you do with matcha, beyond making cups of tea with it? Luckily, if you can think about it, someone on the internet has already beaten you to it, and wrote lots of helpful blog posts about all the things you can do with matcha.

Turns out it's like gaffa tape or vinegar: there are a million things you can do with it. The first thing that caught my eye though was matcha pudding: getting some soy milk, some chia seeds and some matcha, and leaving it in a tub to do its thing overnight.

Then voila, next day is chia matcha pudding day! It's all sort of minerally and thick and tasty. And, more importantly, it's bright green - if only I'd have made this on Hallowe'en!

The next recipe for clearing out your cupboard comes to you courtesy of a Times recipe (it's paywalled, so I can't link though either) by some celebrity chef or other.

I've had a bottle of chocolate vegan stout on hand to make it since forever, yet still haven't got round to cooking up this bad boy, or even drinking the stout, which is a mixture of idiocy and laziness that shouldn't be forgiven by anyone in a hurry. I hang my head in shame.

So, with a house move pending, I decided the time was ripe for a chocolate stout cake (or rather what was to turn out to be more like chocolate stout pudding). It was a mixture of chocolate, flour, sugar, vegan butter, chocolate stout and cocoa powder, baked in the oven in a water bath for a while.

I was expecting a cake, but it came out kind of moussey. There was also a really strong tang of the beer, very iron-y, in the background, which I couldn't decided if it was good or not. I mean, I like stout and I like cake, but you don't get me chucking chunks of pudding in my beer, so why try it the other way around?

Anyway, an interesting experiment, but maybe I'll keep my desserts and booze separate in future.

Other things that have been mysteriously hanging around in my kitchen for far too long, despite my extreme fondness for both, is a huge chunk of marzipan and some tiny pots of jam (a really cute wedding favour made by the mother of the groom at some nuptials I went to a couple of months ago).

I decided, what with figs being in season and still fairly cheap at the moment, was to try and make stuffed figs with cashew cream.

I split the figs, added a nugget of marzipan and a teaspoon of jam, and top with some soaked cashews blended with icing sugar, vanilla extract and a bit of water to make a creamy topping.

The figs, jam and marzipan turned into a big, thick, sticky hedonistic fruit mess. The cashew stuff went crispy and weird. Still, I ate the whole lot, so it can't have been too bad, eh?