Junior J's 6th: Chocolate cheese cake (and the food)

We really racked our brains to think of what food to order for Junior J's party this year. We wanted something different from the stuff we've been ordering for parties (we've done sushi, DIY popiah, and Peranakan for previous celebrations), and something that Junior J liked to eat. In the end, we went with Poulet, since we loved their chicken, and Junior J especially loves the mash potato there! 

Poulet does not do delivery, so we ended up ordering the food the day before, and hubs picked it up just before the party. Their chicken is really yummy, and we also ordered ratatouille and mash potato, and made our own salad. We also served fruit and konnyaku (made by my mum) for dessert. 

The cake was quite a headache. Junior J wanted something with chocolate. We wanted to get something egg-free so that Lil J could also eat the cake, but egg-free cakes are quite rare. This round, I didn't want to spend too much money on the cake, so in the end, I opted to make my own. I was really nervous making it, since I am no baker. Half my bakes turn out disastrous, so much so that my boys would politely decline, and say they do not want to eat them! 

I found this recipe for a chocolate cheese cake that seemed doable, and we did a test run with a smaller cake. The boys loved it, so we decided to go with it.

However, Junior J was rather perplexed: why was the test cake rectangular? Aren't birthday cakes supposed to be round, like in all the pictures in books? (I had used a Pyrex baking dish for the test cake.) I also didn't have a springform pan, and wasn't too confident in getting the cake out of a regular baking tin intact. So I rushed down to Phoon Huat to try to get a springform pan, only to find out that they were sold out. So I ended up just using my square baking tin for the cake. My tin was too large, so the cake turned out really thin, and I was wondering if the candles we had bought (from Daiso, don't you just love these?) would hold up in a cake that was just an inch high! 

Thankfully, the candles did hold up. However, we found that you have to be really fast when lighting these, and you can't leave them burning for too long, since these are pretty small and melt really quickly. We ended up with wax on the cake, but it was easy to flick the bits of wax off.

Another thing I realized (on the day itself!) was that I didn't have any suitable plate or base for the cake to rest on. In the end, I used our cheese board, as it was the largest flat surface I could find in the kitchen. 

All the crazy scrambling seemed to pay off, since Junior J loved his cake (even though he had already been eating slices of our test cake for a few days before the party), and our guests said it was yummy. Now that this has worked out, I guess I might just have to make the cake for the boys' parties from now on!