Tag: friends

The Unicorn Cake

Earlier this year I made the decision to be the cool aunt to my friend’s kids as I’m in mid-twenties and not close to having kids yet. I absolutely love children, love to spoil them but also love to be able to give them back when they cry or have a dirty diaper!

So one of my best friends has a daughter who recently turned 10! Her mom set out to make her a number 10 cake with unicorn decorations! Spoiler alert- it came out amazing!

The process to get it done was, let’s say, interesting! She bought a box of cake mix- the rainbow variation of course. Baked a blue and pink sheet cake, and then by some magical unknown power was able to cut the digits for the cake out of the sheet cake without assistance. If you’ve ever baked a number cake you would be well aware that you’re supposed to have piece A, piece B etc and then almost “build” the number cake. Not this woman, nope she just cut the number out of the sheet cake, I’m still impressed obviously.

She then proceeded to ice the bottom sheet cake and stuck the top sheet cake on top of the icing! She made the icing with butter and icing sugar and used some gel food colouring to get some very nice pastel colours for the icing.

The previous day we had been on the hunt for cake décor items, sadly living in a very small town we only had one shop to go to. The shop didn’t have very many options.

One town over there is this amazing little cake decorating shop, called Helen’s Dream Creations I am so glad it exists as we found the perfect little unicorn horns and ears there! We did regrettably realise that we should have ordered some décor for the cake from them prior to the day we actually needed it as they were busy making unicorn things for another order which looked absolutely splendid.

At the one and only baking shop in our town we did find some cool piping bags in which you can put two different colours of icing to pipe together and it looks stunning once it’s done!

My friend added some meringues, twisted marshmallows and all kinds of fun sprinkles to the cake and it came out beautiful! (photo will be added here) One person said that it looked like a unicorn sneezed on the cake, which got taken as a compliment of course!

We also attempted to make cake pops by crumbling up the left over cake from cutting out the numbers, adding some icing to it and then rolling them into balls. They were then supposed to go onto sticks and dipped into white chocolate, however they wouldn’t stick to the sticks. We’ll still go on a mission to figure out why.

I hope you will go on a hunt to find the perfect things to decorate your next cake with.

Love Jo xoIMG-20190626-WA0107

 

Jo’s take aways

  1. Make time for those who are special to you
  2. If you are trying something new maybe Google how to do it beforehand
  3. Find out if you can pre order things

 

Sushi Search – Part One of Many

IMG_20190515_215636I have decided to take the challenge upon myself to check out all the (affordable) sushi places in P.E. and surrounding areas and review them on my blog; so that you my dear friends and followers can avoid a bad sushi experience. (This definitely has nothing at all to do with the fact that I love sushi myself). The first place I decided to try out was TORO Sushi, Teppanyaki & Seafood.

A friend of mine and I decided we were in the mood to go out- sushi sounded like a great idea and I had been dying to try out the buffet at TORO. Their sushi buffet is really well priced at R169.00 for all you can eat sushi (there are some restrictions but we’ll get to those in a bit), and you also get 4 salmon roses and 4 small pieces of sashimi.

They were running a contest at the time (and I think they still are) where if you do the buffet and stack your different coloured plates, you need to take a selfie with your stacked plates and tag TORO on Instagram or Facebook to win a voucher. However when we got there we were told that when doing the buffet you are only allowed to take white plates off the conveyer belt at the sushi bar, so this was quite confusing. We didn’t enquire further though because at the end of the day we didn’t really care that much about the contest but more about the fact that we could finally enjoy this experience together.

So we were 4 friends who decided to go to TORO and 3 of us did the buffet. You can’t share with someone not doing the buffet though (let’s just say we learned this through experience)  just so you know for when you go try them out! You have two options, you can either take sushi off the conveyer belt (white plates only though) or you can order off the menu on your table (you can do both if you want as well).

I opted for ordering off the menu as we were sitting far away from the sushi bar and I would find it awkward to constantly walk through the rest of the patrons. I had avocado & cream cheese California rolls as well as salmon & cream cheese California rolls which were absolutely divine and decadent! I did however realise that both the choices of ordering off the menu and ordering sushi with cream cheese in were big mistakes – how so, you may ask?

When you order off the menu, your sushi takes a while to get to the table hence giving the sushi you already ate time to digest. This causes you to fill up a lot quicker than you would want to at an ALL YOU CAN EAT sushi buffet, and the cream cheese being so rich also had a hand in me eating a lot less than I would have anticipated!

I was slightly disappointed by the amount of mayonnaise on my salmon roses, but luckily we had a very hard working waiter and he went to get extra mayo for my salmon roses. Thank you, Jacques!

All in all, it was an amazing experience! The food was great even though I ate less than I would have hoped, and the company was amazing.

You know that table at the restaurant that makes everyone else uncomfortable with the amount of fun they’re having? Yeah, we were that table! There was a man sitting at a table adjacent to ours and he enjoyed eavesdropping on our silly conversations so much that he bought a round of shooters for our table.

Sometimes when you look forward to an experience for a long time it doesn’t live up to your expectations, but my time at TORO really did. The food was good but the company was better, and I’m pretty sure we made our waiter blush a few times as well.

Definitely go give TORO Sushi, Teppanyaki & Seafood a try!

Love Jo xo

 

Jo’s Take Aways

  1. Take good company with
  2. Sit at the sushi bar to consume more food
  3. Have extra mayo for the table
  4. Be nice to your waiter – give a decent tip

For photos of the evening check out my instagram @imjoxo