Recipe lets you go from plain green tea ice cream to fancy, photogenic matcha sweets in just a few minutes.

Before we go any farther, let’s get one thing straight: You give us a scoop of matcha ice cream, and we’re going to be happy. Here at Soranews24, we make no secret of our love of green tea, our love of desserts, and, above all, our love of green tea desserts.

And yet, sometimes when we hit up our local convenience store on a dessert run, Häagen-Dazs’s green tea ice cream can feel just a little anticlimactic. Häagen-Dazs has sort of brought this upon itself, since while the American ice cream brand with the European-sounding name makes excellent green tea ice cream, they’ve also spoiled us with all sorts of deluxe green tea desserts like the Matcha Crumble, the Azuki Kuromitsu Japonais, and the Matcha Creme Brulee. Those tend to only be available for a limited time, though, so when the only Häagen-Dazs matcha variety in stock is the plain old green tea ice cream, we’re still happy, just not as happy as we could be.

So when Häagen-Dazs Japan recently posted a recipe to turn a regular cup of green tea ice cream into a fancy and photogenic dessert drink on their website, they had our attention, and the Yuzu Green Tea Float had a spot on our sweets-eating schedule calendar.

Let’s start with a look at the ingredients. Häagen-Dazs’ recipe is sized for making two glasses, either so you can share with a friend or have one glass for each of your hands.

Ingredients
● Green tea leaves (5 grams [0.2 ounces] or 1 tea bag)
● Water (130 milliliters [4.4 ounces])
● Yuzucha (60 grams [2.1 ounces])
● Ice
● Soda water
● Häagen-Dazs Green Tea ice cream (2 mini cup containers)

A quick note: even though cha is the Japanese word for “tea,” yuzucha isn’t tea. Instead, it’s a paste made from yuzu (a kind of citrus fruit) and honey, which is then dissolved in water to form a tea-like drink. You can find yuzucha for sale in Japanese supermarkets, and often Korean ones too.

Step 1: Using the water, brew the green tea. Using a tea bag or tea leaves are both fine, but if you’re using loose leaves, you’ll need a strainer too, since we don’t want any leaves to get into the Yuzu Green Tea Float.

Step 2: Once the green tea has cooled, take an empty glass and add the yuzucha (30 grams for one glass).

Step 3: Add a layer of ice on top of the yuzucha.

Step 4: Pour in the green tea (65 milliliters for each glass).

Step 5: Add soda water until you’ve got the level of carbonation you like best.

Step 6: Add a scoop of Green Tea ice cream to the top, and you’re ready t-

Whoops. Our first try didn’t come out looking very nice, as the ice cream scoop started to melt away before we even had time to snap a picture.

Luckily, as mentioned above, Häagen-Dazs recipe calls for enough ingredients to make two glasses, so we could try again right away. For our second attempt, we made two adjustments. First, instead of scooping the ice cream directly from the container into the cup, we first scooped it into a tray and stuck it in the freezer for extra hardness, and so that we wouldn’t waste time scooping it at room temperature.

Thanks to these two changes, our second Yuzu Green Tea Float…

…was a thing of beauty, and stayed that way long enough for us to record photographic evidence.

Our taste tester, Aoi Kuroneko, was a little skeptical of combining the rich flavor of green tea ice cream with the sharp citrus of yuzu, but found the resulting combination both satisfyingly sweet and refreshingly citrusy. Add in the enticing aroma of yuzu and matcha floating up with the popping of every bubble of the soda water and the beautiful color of the drink, and Aoi has no complaints whatsoever.

It’s worth pointing out that while the recipe comes from Häagen-Dazs, theoretically it should work with any brand of green tea ice cream. So the next time your local store doesn’t have any deluxe matcha frozen treats (like, say, if you don’t live in Japan), but they do at least have green tea ice cream, keep this recipe in mind. Your taste buds will thank you, and you just might sleep better too.

Source: Häagen-Dazs
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Insert images: SoraNews24, Pakutaso (edited by SoraNews24)
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