Kyo-Machiya Matcha Cake

I've often been impressed by the design element involved in Japanese foods and their presentation, but this Kyoto souvenir, which I received from a visiting friend, has to be one of the nicest-looking I've ever seen, not only on the outside of the package, but on the inside as well. The way the box, the plastic wrappers on each individual cake, and the layered cake itself all contain the same shades of green and brown and the same pattern of vertical and horizontal lines is endlessly delightful to the eye. There may also be a bit of linguistic wordplay at work here, since a machiya is the traditional Kyoto house depicted on the box, and the cakes are flavored with matcha, green tea, one of the traditional flavors of Kyoto. So a matcha Kyo-Machiya Cake might be a pun, contributing to the overall mirroring effect of the total package.
Japanese souvenir foods are very often individually wrapped, and their shelf life is usually far shorter than it is normal for commercially-prepared food in the U.S. This gives them the advantage of tasting much fresher, though of course it also means they stop tasting good much sooner. Though a Twinkie can famously survive years in its plastic wrapper unchanged, a Kyo-Machiya Cake is slated to go out of date within a mere week. Considering that when you buy cakes from a Japanese bakery, they always warn you that it needs to be consumed the very same day, I guess a week is a pretty long time.
What exactly is a Kyo-Machiya Cake? Helpfully, the package includes a diagram describing each element (and an illustration showing how to tip it out of its plastic container - which I would have thought would be pretty intuitive, but you never know...). It consists of two layers of green tea genoise, three layers of black-bean-and-green-tea ganache, and on the top and bottom, green tea flavored yatsuhashi. These are a little hard to describe, but they're probably the number one souvenir sweet sold in Kyoto. They're soft and chewy, a sheet of sweetened glutinous rice dough that's sold either in plain rectangles like the ones used in this cake or else in triangles folded around a filling of bean paste or sometimes chocolate. This cake, with its faint but distinguishable flavor of black beans harmonizing with the predominant matcha, and its east-meets-west texture combination of chewy yatsuhashi with airy genoise, is a surprising creation. What's even more surprising is how good it is.

Kyo-Machiya cake is made by Otabe, which has souvenir stands all over Kyoto, including Kyoto Station.