KayB's Cakes: November 2010

Monday, November 15, 2010

7-Eleven Day. The best weekend ever. Part Two.

What’s your favourite holiday? Christmas? Your birthday? Halloween?

Mine is 7-Eleven day. Ok, not exactly a holiday. But it should be. I mean, it’s free slurpees.

It was on again, for young and old. An annual race around Sydney to devour as many free slurpees as humanly possible. The challenge. Beat last year’s total of 9 slurpees in a shorter time frame. This year, the almighty powers at 7-Eleven headquarters decided to put a time limit on the festivities. 7am til 2.11pm. For those of you playing at home, that is exactly 7 hours and 11 minutes. Bucket loads of time to hit up 10 different locations, right? Yeah, in theory it was. But in practice.. well..

I don’t know how to put this delicately, so I won’t. I’ll give it to you straight, at the chance of hurting some feelings. This year we had a team of four people in my car. Miss Moon, BecFace, D-Gale and myself. Our story begins 12 hours earlier. Let’s move back to the previous day, shall we?

Saturday. Miss Moon was out for a night on the town with a male friend. Rad tunes and tasty beverages. Lots of tasty beverages. We all know what copious amounts of alcohol can do to you. We each have out limits. And sometimes when we hit that limit, we do silly things. But what’s silly about a playground? Nothing, you might say. Well, at 1am in the morning after many tasty beverages, apparently lots of things about a playground are silly. Including a flying fox. Upside down. Children, don’t attempt this at home. Miss Moon thought it would be fun to ride the flying fox upside down. It wasn’t. One busted shoulder later, followed by an emergency visit to the medical centre, and our quest for free slurpees was delayed several hours. I’d appreciated it if every single person who reads this would leave Miss Moon a heckling comment about her questionable decisions that night. Or, if you’ve done something even worse, let us know so we can make Miss Moon feel a bit better about her lapse in judgement. Moon, consider this your early birthday present. I love you. Ahem, ok, now that we’ve got that out of the way..

(Only 3 slurpees in and the team is already starting to lose focus)

We headed off at 11am. 3 hours and 11 minutes to hit up 10 locations. It was tough. We didn’t factor in getting lost (which happened approximately 2.5 times). We also didn’t factor in drinking time (some locations were less than 4 minutes apart, and the rules state that you must finish one slurpee before arriving at the next location, or you have to skull. Hello brain freeze!).

Speaking of brain freeze, I was the first solider down (shamefully, at the first location), followed closely by D-Gale. And this year the team would like to hand out some awards.

(D-Gale and Moon posing for photos. We're kinda famous at 7-Eleven)

First awards goes to ARNCLIFFE for

Best slurpee consistency.

Second award goes to MAROUBRA for

Most ineffective service.

Flavour of the year goes to

Kiwi Strawberry.

And the final verdict. Drum roll please..... we got 9 locations. Even with my manic driving, we didn’t get to 10 locations within the allotted time. We could have ‘cheated’ and grabbed two slurpees at the last location, but it just didn’t feel right.

The moral of the story. 7-Eleven people, please don’t put a limit on this glorious day. It just cripples the customers who love sluprees so much. Oh, and don’t hang upside down from a flying fox. Ever.

7-Eleven Stores

7-Eleven Arncliffe

28 Princes Highway

7-Eleven Bexley

474 Forest Road

7-Eleven Caringbah

367 The Kingsway (Cnr. Willarong Road)

7-Eleven Cronulla

47 The Kingsway (Cnr. Gosport Street)

7-Eleven Maroubra

1 Meagher Avenue (Cnr. Malabar Road)

7-Eleven Matraville

515 Bunnerong Road

7-Eleven Narwee

161 Penshurst Road (Cnr. Hannans Road)

7-Eleven Penshurst

612 Forest Road (Cnr. George Street)

7-Eleven Ramsgate

368 Rocky Point Road

Monday, November 8, 2010

Zumbo's Macaron Day and 7-11 Day. The best weekend ever. Part one.

If I had my own way, I’d easily sleep in til 10am, 11am, even 12pm every day. Unfortunately The Boy likes to rise at 7am. It’s a trying fact in our relationship and something that we are currently working through. Lucky for me, he is away at the moment. And shamefully, this means that he missed me dragging my tired ass out of bed at 6am this Saturday in search of macarons. I would have received an absolute serving from him “What! You never get out of bed that early for me! Stop wasting the day!”.

Saturday, the 6^th November is Macaron Day. The ridiculously talented Adriano Zumbo, of Zumbo patisserie pulls together 60 plus macaron variations each year on this day (also known as his birthday). And having worked last year on Macaron Day, this year I was getting up early and dragging Miss Moon to Balmain with me to get my macaron on!

The day started with a 6am alarm. Stumbling around my empty, dark apartment, tripping over coffee tables, etc. Then off to pick up Miss Moon via White Horse Coffee, Sutherland. Oh there is nothing better than good coffee and very attractive boys at 7am to make you feel perky about the day ahead. Honestly, I don’t care if the attractive cashier and even more attractive barista flirt with all the girls that come in for coffee. And I don’t even care that attractiveness and subtle flirting abilities are prerequisites when applying for a job at White Horse, just so long as they make me feel like the prettiest girl to ever walk into their shop.. ok, I’m getting distracted now. Sorry. But seriously. Go to White Horse. Just for attractive men. Oh, and coffee.

With coffee in hand, we were off to Balmain in the pouring rain. It was absolutely bucketing! Streets were flooding, drain pipes were exploding. Horrific weather. But we rocked up to Zumbo’s just after 8am and in line we waited for approximately 1 and a half hours.

People were coming out of the shop with boxes upon boxes of macarons! Once inside, one of staff members told us that someone had just spent $280 - At 2 bucks each, that’s 140 macarons! Made my measly 15 macarons seen pointless. But it wasn’t pointless. It was amazing! Between myself and Miss Moon we tried around 30 flavours. Below is the full list – highlighted in red are the ones that we tried.

(Insides of the Hamburger macaron)

Top marks go to the yoghurt, chilli and tangerine. Just the right amount of chilli and a hint of yoghurt which really made the citrus flavour pop. Shear brilliance in a macaron.

Unfortunately, at 9.30am, some flavours were still MIA. I was more than willing to buy a whole box full of Beer and Nuts macarons, but “they haven’t arrived yet”. Also missing were fish and chips, fairy bread and black garlic. A little disappointing considering the shop had been open since 7am.

Macaron Day 2010

Almond

Beer and nuts

Black garlic

Black Sesame

Blackcurrant

Blood and chocolate

Blue cheese - all the savoury lovers, put your hands up! This is a winner for the cheese lovers out there.

Blueberry Lavender - only for fans of lavender. Is anyone not a fan? Very delicate and sweet.

Burnt Toast

Cereal box

Chestnut Passionfruit

Cherry adzuki bean

Choc Banana

Choc Mayonnaise - this was Miss Moon's choice. Mayonnaise belongs on a sandwich. That is all.

Choc Salt and Vinegar

Choc Smoked Marshmallow

Choc Water (H2O) - chocolate, with a refreshing twist. Intriguing.

Choc Zumbo

Chocolate

Citron

Coconut

Coffee

Cookie Dough - cookie dough centre was more of an 'Anzac biscuit' dough. I prefer choc chip dough, personally.

Cucumber mint yoghurt

Fairy Bread

Fingerbun

Fish and chips

Hamburger - real beetroot and cheese. Bit of mustard tang. Messy.

Hazelnut

Kalamata Olive with Candy

Lamington

Lemon Verbena + Mint

Liquorice

Lollipops - like a vanilla and strawberry chuppa chup. Winner.

Lychee - filled with a small bit of lychee jelly.

Mandarin

Milo

Mocha

Negroni

Pandan

Pancake and maple syrup

Passionfruit

Peanut butter and jelly - jelly was a little bit gritty. But peanut butter in a macaron is amazing!

Pear Vanilla Macadamia

Pecan Danish

Pineapple + Coconut - tasted like a splice ice cream! I will go back for this one again, and again, and again..

Pinenut Gianduja

Pistachio

Raspberry

Redskins

Rice pudding

Rose

Ruby Grapefruit

Salmon - holy shit! Props to Zumbo for recreating salmon in a dessert! Spot on! One small problem. Creamy, buttery salmon makes me gag. Terrible, terrible, terrible.

Salt and Vinegar - all the salt and vinegar was Miss Moon's choice. Not a fan. That's just me. Sorry.

Salted Butter Caramel

Salted Butter Popcorn - creamy, creamy butter cream filling. Yum.

Salted milk choc caramel

Sichuan pepper

Spelt

Sticky Date

Strawberry Bubblegum

Tabaccoroon

Toothpaste - tasted like spearmint. I like spearmint.

Vanilla

Vegemite Sourdough - with the buttercream filling, this tasted EXACTLY like a vegemite sammie on white bread!