Cotton Soft Japanese Cheesecake - Blue, Red & White for my team

        Whenever there is a get together of any size or occasion there is an excuse for me to cook/bake something to bring along. It's also a chance to try and make something different that I havn't done before. So when dear Fil organised an NRL grand final viewing at his place I was already trying to think of what I wanted to make.

        At first I was thinking something easy like brownies but I also wanted to make something I was able to include team colours in. Next idea was maybe a plain buttercake but I thought that was boring. I've only had Japanese cheesecake once or twice and have always wanted to try and make it at home. I really like that it's kind of a mix between a cheesecake and a soft sponge cake. The fact that I was able to colour it meant it was a perfect idea for this occasion.

        I remembered that I saw a post on Japanese Cheesecake at Not Quite Nigella so thought I would use it as a reference for my cake. I left out the rare cheesecake part, originally was going to use some raspberry puree and blueberries to make a red and blue layer but then scrapped that idea and just made a plain cheesecake and coloured the batter.

Ingredients:

• 50g butter
• 250g cream cheese
• 100 ml milk
• 60g plain flour
• 20g cornflour
• 150g sugar
• 6 eggs separated
• Pinch of salt

        The butter, cream cheese, and milk are put in a bowl and heated over a saucepan of water on medium low heat until it's all melted and combined.

        Once the cheese mixture has cooled, the egg yolks are added along with the sifted flours.

        In a seperate bowl, whisk the egg whites with a pinch of salt until foamy and then beat in the sugar until soft peaks form. Fold the egg whites into the cream cheese and egg mixture. Make sure there are no streaks left. The next part is optional, if you don't require any colouring it is perfectly okay to pour the batter into a greased/lined cake pan. (Approximately 9-10 inch wide).

        So I roughly divided the batter into 3 parts and coloured 2 parts with red and blue (Wilton) gel colouring.

        I could have just 3 layers but then I remember seeing striped (rainbow) cakes around so thought would try my hand at attempting to get stripes in my cake. Starting in the centre I just poured the batter in small portions, alternating between the colours just pouring the next colour straight into the centre of the previous one. The batter was slowly pushed out and gave me the effect above.

        The circles were looking a bit like a target so I decided to run a skewer through the circles to create the webbed effect above. Starting from the outside, I drew a line towards the middle, and went around, cleaning the skewer tip as I went along. I only did this on the surface of the cake as to not mix up the batter underneath.

        Place the cake pan in a water bath of boiling water and bake in a preheated oven at  160 degrees celcius for 1 hour and 10 minutes.

        I had no idea what my cake looked like underneath the surface and was just so eager to cut it up but I had to wait until Sunday night to serve it up. I like how pretty the top turned out.

        So I finally get to cut up my cake! It got some pretty funny reactions from people, asking me what it was. The blue almost looks a little like mould as was noted by some people. Once you had a piece it was hard to stop though. Soft, spongey but slightly creamy with a subtle hint of cheese, it was addictively good! Will have to make it again, and maybe experiment with flavours and toppings.

        Oh and I guess it's quite obvious which team I was rooting for right? So they lost the grand final... they've come a bloody long way from last year though. And loyal supporters don't ditch their teams. Well technically they are Ryan's team... Ryan thinks I need to find another team to support just to make things interesting.