Chilled Mango Cheesecake

I'm so thankful to be blessed to work in a company where the people are so friendly and so easy and fun to work with. I enjoy working where I do right now, it doesn't feel so much like working really because I actually enjoy being with the people around me and doing what I do (there are exceptional times of course :P). There are so much hospitality and laugh and stories shared each day, and work of course even with the people I don't really know. Instead of being my coworkers, they have become friends to me.

Today, we had a potluck party during lunch time for a group of people. I was so excited to try different foods from different countries and just experiencing the good food made by them. I was planning to bring an Indonesian dish (I know they'd love it) and a dessert (by request). Until the day or the night before, my mind was still blank, don't know what to make. There were so much things to be done at work and at home that I didn't even have enough time to sit down and just think about what I wanted to make. So, after forcing myself to concentrate, I wrote down some options for desserts that I can make at home, something light, fruity, and not difficult and take so much time to make, and hopefully fancy enough to meet their "high expectation" :P. I decided not to cook for time constraint since I only have few hours to prepare the dessert and also cook for the whole house too :)

I finally settled on chilled mango cheesecake after a careful consideration. I have one layer of chiffon-type cake left in the freezer, some mango pulp in the freezer as well, and there are so many fresh mangoes almost gone bad, plus unused heavy cream that I bought to make my brother's cake but ended up not using it at all. Besides, I absolutely LOVE mango, one of my all-time favorite fruits, so mango chilled cheesecake it is! I just need to make a stop on my way home to buy some cream cheese, and I'm all set.

I kinda measuring and mixing as I go. Adding the mango pulp while weighing it so that I can take a note for future, how much pulp I needed to make the mango flavor pronounced, thinking that lemon juice might help with discoloration and balancing the flavor, things like that. I tasted the batter, and I couldn't stop my finger from keep licking it (with different fingers excuse me). I poured the mango glaze in the morning and decorated very simple. It's not too pretty, but that's what I had on hand at the time.

When I opened the box at work, I was shocked to find out that the glaze was running down the side of the cake! oh no! I panicked but tried to calm down as I got work waiting for me. I admit that I drove a little too fast (I was late :D) and I completely forgot that there was a cake I need to take care of. But, I can't do anything to fix it except wipe off the glaze from the cake. It doesn't look pretty anymore :(, I should have taken a picture or two before I took it to work.

I was so sad about the appearance because really, it look so pretty before (well, at least for me) :(. But it all paid off after getting unexpected come back from my coworkers!!! I wasn't expecting that many compliments from them, but I'm so glad that they all LOVED it. Even the person who doesn't like mango at all finished a slice. One girl even printed the cheesecake she ate and put it outside her cube, I mean what could be more rewarding than that? I just hope that they didn't sing me that embarrassing happy birthday song when they asked me to cut into the cake (and no, it wasn't my birthday) :D