Festive Zombie Fingers & Elf Puree Bark

I tried two new recipes using dehydrated elf puree (matcha powder).  Matcha is powdered green tea.  It has a lovely color, which is why I started playing with it.  It also has a distinct, what I would call grassy flavor, which is starting to grow on me.  The feedback I've received has been all over the place.  Some people love it, some hate it, some say it's edible, but definitely not their favorite.  

First up, my favorite of the two, zombie fingers.  Yet another recipe where I'm using silicone molds from Michaels that are no longer available. Hopefully these will be back next fall.  Now that I'm older and wiser, I don't buy molds unless I absolutely love them and when I do, I buy four so I can make a whole batch of whatever at the same time.

I love the colors of these fingers, the green matcha with the red and white (Could that be blood and bone?), is absolutely lovely.  I liked the flavor of these cookies. I thought they were so much better than the ones I made last year.  There's enough sweet to balance the green tea, but they're not too sweet. 

The recipe for Match Cookies with Cranberries & White Chocolate is from U Try It.  These cookies are made by rolling the dough into a log, chilling, then slicing into individual cookies.  Since I was pressing it into molds, I chopped up the dried cranberries and white chocolate into small pieces before adding them to the dough.  The dough was stiff enough to work with without chilling, but I did chill the filled molds on a cookie sheet for 10 minutes before baking. 

Since this was the first time trying this recipe I only made half and that was enough to fill two molds (16 fingers) all the way to the top.  I was surprised how much they expanded while baking since there is no leavening in the recipe.  They didn't overflow or anything but next time I will probably fill them a little less and maybe make 20 fingers.  Anytime you use a mold or muffin tin and don't fill all the cavities you should fill the empty ones with water.   

The second recipe for Pistachio Matcha Dark Chocolate Bark is from The Delicious Life.  Some people really liked this and some thought it was just ok.  I really like the look of it, but I didn't care for the taste.  I think the white chocolate complimented the matcha powder nicely, it was actually the pistachios and chocolate I wasn't crazy about.  I love dark chocolate and I love pistachios, but I didn't like them together, which surprised me. 

I did fudge the recipe a little. They do a layer of chocolate and pistachios, then dollop and swirl white chocolate and white chocolate mixed with matcha on top and then sprinkle on more pistachios. 

I wanted the green matcha to be more visible so I did the layer of white chocolate with the matcha mixture first and then covered that with the mixture of pistachios and dark chocolate.