Cakexperiments- Green tea with lemon & ombre

I've got really into trying to think up new flavours and try new ideas with my cakes recently. This time I had two ideas I wanted to try, green tea with lemon, and ombre cake! I made a basic cupcake batch and split it so I could try both at the same time.

For the green tea cakes, I steeped a couple of teabags while I prepared the mix. I wasn't really sure how much I would need, or how strong the flavour would be after it was baked. I looked up earl grey cupcakes in one of my recipe books for how much to add, and from a couple recipes, I added 2 tbsp, and a little extra. I put cases in my cupcake pan, and decided to do three with the green tea, and add some extra lemon juice to the other three.

I was taking notes all through this, so my cases were different colours for a reason. Green cases were just the green tea, and yellow had added lemon juice. 
Next I went back and split the other half of the plain mix into three, and coloured two with different amounts of pink gel colour.

I had two tries, going from pink to white, and the other way round. They all baked pretty well, but I think I got rid of the air I'd beaten in originally as they didn't rise all that much. There was actually a small colour difference between the two green tea types surprisingly, but the ombre cakes came out a bit of a mess.

Obviously I needed a taste test!!
They are underfilled their cases, but I do think thats from overmixing, as theres no other difference from this and my usual basic mix.

The green tea cakes were pretty evenly baked and light. The taste was quite nice, quite sweet, but the main lemon taste had sank to the bottom. Considering I didn't add any other sweet flavouring like vanilla, they had a good flavour to them. 
Strangely I expected the added lemon ones to be sweeter and for it to enhance the flavour, but it was the opposite. The cake was much wetter, even though it was baked through, maybe it needed longer than the others. It had next to no flavour really, not good at all.

The ombre cupcakes baked well, but I added too much vanilla. I think I probably added enough for 12 cupcakes when I needed half as much! I'm not so happy with the results either. I should have thought about the way the cake cooks, thinking back to making zebra cake in cupcakes and how that cooks. There was also no fade like I had imagined in my head! I'm not sure how I would really achieve that, unless I try to mix it about when its all in the case, but I don't want marble patterns..

 All in all it was good to experiment, and to be able to try lots at once. I would probably make the green tea ones again. I have seen people adding matcha powder for a good effect and taste, but I didn't really like how they were so green in colour.