Green Tea Strawberry Cake: National Dry Cake Day

I was reading an article the other day via my twitter feed about the fact that we have a "Food/Animal/Normal Thing Everyone Does Day" for essentially every day of the year now and how it's particularly driven by social media. Oh! It was in the NYT I think, because the very first 2 sentences were about some 13 year old from like Palo Alto looking forward to National Watermelon Day so she could post a picture that she took weeks ago of herself eating watermelon. This is what triggered my memory of the NYT because 1) Lol California is so far away from NY and 2) Lol this article is about a 13 year old from a fairly affluent part of the US.

Anyways, the article just spends a very long time talking about how people feel that its weird to just post a "random picture" of themselves unless they can caption it to tie-in with a a national event/day. My second favorite part of that article was when they described this 13 year old's watermelon picture, particularly emphasizing just how boring and uninspiring the picture was. As a quote below (clearly I've become so invested into this article that I of course looked it up and will now link it here):

Ms. Khan does not “have a special thing about watermelons,” and the picture of her eating one was not a momentous event. It was a hot day in June. She and a friend bought a watermelon. Someone took a picture.

Isn't that just magical? To be fair, you probably could go off the deep end here and make a reasonable point about how these random national holidays are favored because they make your watermelon day part of a greater community of watermelon days and obviously at our core, we're social creatures that like to feel that we belong.

I bring up this entirely forgettable article about how social media works because I'm a bit culpable to it myself. When I have no idea what to talk about for a post (ie here), my train of thought usually goes along the lines of "what season is it, how can green tea and or strawberries be relevant to the fact I'm horribly sunburnt and musing about the fact I just bought a sun cookie cutter because I could make it into an astrocyte cookie too." And darn, green tea and strawberries have nothing to do with any of those things! Arg! If only there was a national green tea strawberry cake that looks great but is actually too dry day.

Unfortunately there is not a day (yet) for such a holiday, so you'll have to just savor these relatively pretty pictures without a "btw it's green tea and strawberry cake day!" caption. As I alluded to earlier, this cake didn't actually turn out as great as I wanted it to due to the fact I continue to suck at baking cakes. I probably could have soaked the cake in a bit more simple syrup to counter the dry factor, and there was likely some fishiness going on with my egg whites folding and integrity. But the color contrasts between the red, white, and green are appealing regardless. So you know, if you suck at baking cakes like I do, just put this out as decoration, but bring out like ice cream when you need to actually serve people dessert.
Recipe from La Fuji Mama, with an added 1 tbsp of matcha/green tea powder to the dry ingredients.