Green Tea Ice Cream Cake with Green Tea Icing

Lots of green tea in this recipe... but green tea in dessert is delicious!  I actually messed up this recipe a lot.  I think I tried to do too much at once (try a new recipe, make an ice-cream cake, and attempt decorating a cake).  I also still have not gotten the hang of taking awesome pictures of the food I make since either a) I'm in a rush or b) I'm too hungry to care about taking a picture.  But mostly it's me being an amateur.  Anywho, please do not judge too harshly.  I plan on making this cake again... except without the ice-cream.  Ice-cream cakes are a pain to decorate without the ice-cream melting on you.  If I were to do this again, it would be in the winter with a type of ice-cream that doesn't melt so quickly...

Ingredients (for cake):
2 c. flour
1 1/2 tsp. b soda
1/2 tsp. salt
8 tsp. green tea powder (can be grounded from dried leaves)
1 1/4 c. sugar
1 c. vegetable oil
3 eggs
1 c. plain yoghurt
1 1/2 tsp. v. extract
Green Tea Ice Cream
Makes one cake

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 F.
Mix dry ingredients.
Whip eggs, add oil... mix rest of wet ingredients.
Sift dry into wet, blend well. Place into greased 9 in. pan.
Bake for about 30 minutes or until toothpick in center comes out clean.
Let cool, then refrigerate to chill.
Place ice cream in between layers.
Place in freezer.

Ingredients (for icing):
8oz cream cheese
1 tbl. matcha powder (can be found at Whole Foods)
3/4 c. butter, whipped
2 1/2 c. confectioner's sugar

Directions:
Whip it all together!

For this cake, I also used butter cream for the decorations and chocolate to make the chocolate decorations.  I don't really have a good butter cream recipe so I won't post the one I used up.  I had a hard time using the butter cream because it kept melting in my hands while I tried to make the flowers (on top of the cake melting continuously).  Maybe I'm just really slow at decorating.  This is the first time I've attempted to make flower decorations.  The chocolate decorations were done by making a drawing on wax paper and using melted chocolate.   I then placed the wax paper in the refrigerator so the design would harden.  You can just peel it off and use the decoration however you wish.

Clearly, I'm still not good at writing with icing.  Also, I baked the cake in a loaf pan because I wanted a rectangular cake instead of a circular one...  So anyway, with this cake, the problem was that I only put baking powder and forgot the baking soda so I ended up with a VERY dense cake.  Don't make the same mistake! You want it to be moist and fluffy!  The icing was good though.