Housewarming and a Green tea cheesecake

Green tea cheesecake

I made this green tea cheesecake for our housewarming party last night. It's exactly the same recipe as I used before, but with 12g of matcha powder added. (Big thanks to matcha-expert Catty for the advice!) You'll see it rose a little unevenly, but it still tasted really good and was extremely moist. 12g of matcha powder was just the right strength for me - it had a good, prominent green tea taste, but wasn't bitter at all.

So back to the housewarming. I know, I've already been in my new place for 2 months.. it just took us a little bit of time to have a lot of our friends in the same country! (So jealous of everyone's overseas trips, by the way. I am waaay overdue for a holiday!)

We kept the party quite small and casual, serving easy snacky food and lots of drinks.

For snacks, we had Nik Nak's (aka addictive spicy German crunchy-coated peanuts), and some Haribo gummi bears. We made Glühwein (just like in the magical Weihnachtsmärkte), which was perfect for this freezing cold weather.


For more substanial eats, we made pizza broetchen, both veggo (roast capsicum, mushrooms) and meat (salami, ham). I don't know why, but when you're drinking, salty carby food really hits the spot.
Mmm... cheesy goodness...

And for the Malaysian contingent, I made curry puffs! My mum normally makes beef and potato ones, and cooks them in a jaffle iron, but I wanted a veggo version, and have no jaffle iron. I also didn't have a recipe, so I just winged it. I cooked up some onions with garlic and lots of curry powder, then added cooked and cubed potatoes, carrots and peas.

I let it cool overnight, then mashed the mixture roughly with a potato masher and made teensy-weensy little curry puffs with puff pastry triangles.
Pastry + sweet chilli sauce = drinking food

Some of my friends also brought cake. YAY!

This is Su's amazing pandan chiffon cake. Check out how tall it is!
Thanh: Why isn't my pandan cake this tall and fluffy?

Duncan made a super rich and moist sour cream chocolate cake, topped with mandarin icing. I don't normally even like jaffa, but this one was fab! Can we have the recipe please??


Finally, let's have a look at the inside of the matcha cheesecake.
You can see it was really moist, which made it a bit hard to slice, but that didn't prevent us from demolishing the cake.

Remnants of cake. Please also notice the awesome snowflakey Venucci Sweet Pea red and white placemats and coasters. A lovely gift from my friends George and Adri.

It was so much fun! The whole evening was quite chilled, with heaps of people staying quite late and relaxing on the couch. (I suspect this had something to do with the FREEZING weather outside, hehe). The housewarming didn't end until the Argentina Vs. Nigeria match did. We also did the dishes at 3:30 in the morning - SO painful - but how good is it to wake up to a clean kitchen! A couple of friends stayed over, which meant late night chats and late morning coffee and leftover cake for breakfast. What a great way to spend a long weekend!