we can’t get enough of cupcakes, oh no.

at the nicholson street public school halloween fair, after the painting of the $4 plaster cat, and the 20 minutes of standing in line for two rides down — screeeeaming — the giant inflatable slide (“tsunami”), we gamely crossed another four squares off our orange ticket for two adorable orange-iced cupcakes topped with ghost (me) and bat (the kid).

just over bite-sized, with the optimum cake-to-frosting ratio of 1:1, they were tasty, moist cakes with a slightly grainy buttercream. i saved my fondant ghostie for last, then watched the kid spend about 10 minutes trying to catch a numbered tugboat on a hook at the end of a very long pole for a very small prize.

the cupcakes, i believe, were from the cupcake factory, which has just opened up a little nook of a store right next to the zumbo cafe in the ugly brown mall on darling street. when i went by the other day, the glass cases were piled high with rather extravagantly decorated cupcakes. the frosting looked magnificent though the cakes themselves only came in either chocolate or vanilla. clearly, a little more research must be carried out.

halloween in sydney, 2009, is still sorta lukewarm. no trick-or-treaters darkened our doorstep this year, although making our way home from the fair, we did see a trail of gummy worms all the way down the pathway. perhaps a cunning local witch was using them to lure greedy little children to her gingerbread house.

the scariest thing we encountered was a pair of boys on the main drag, fourteen years old maybe, who weren’t so much dressed in costume as in regular black street clothes. one had a bandana obscuring the lower half of his face, and they both carried supermarket plastic bags full of… treats? it looked like they were soliciting… something… from businesses along the street.

oh no, wait. no, the scariest thing was the girl gang who swanned through the fair close to witching hour, all fifteen year old long limbs and long hair, dressed up as playboy bunnies. bloody, bloody hell, kids these days, etc, etc.

well, i am turning 37 in a week.