Green Tea Cake

Panya (pan=bread, ya=shop in Japanese) is one of my favorite bakeries/pastry shops in the East Village. It satisfies my cravings for Japanese loaf bread, which is sort of a brioche bread, perhaps less sweet, and which is usually cut thick, making a most delicious toast (more on that some other time…).

But Panya is also so much more; it has a kitchen that serves Japanese-style breakfast, donburi, soba and udon, sushi, yakisoba, kare raisu and okonomiyaki among many other popular Japanese dishes, as well as Mexican items such as tacos.

It is also a patisserie with Japanese-accented pastries such as this green tea cake, which is really a pound cake. The green color, framed by the brown crust, is irresistible; the taste is a strange melange of green tea and butter that is in the very least unique, sweeter than you’d expect from a Japanese cake.