Dear Reader, do you remember the book and movie Julie & Julia? There was a scene in the book where Julie Powell was going to have a food critic over to her house for dinner. The critic never turned up that evening and I felt for Julie who had been looking forward nervously to the evening. A while back, I had a well known food writer come to my house. We had seen each other at events and I mentioned making a red velvet cake. We got to talking and I invited her over for  morning tea.

As it happens, we discovered that she lives just near to us. I told Mr NQN that she was coming to visit. I warned him against his prolific use of ‘The Draping Effect’. This occurs when he lays clothes out over every surface so that they won’t get wrinkled. Some days I wake up to find three t-shirts draped across the living room. Socks and underpants would be laid out as if a chalk drawings of a dead bodies lay across the floor. Worse still were his ‘pants bombs’. No, nothing as scary as what you might at first imagine.

A pants bomb occurs in the following situation: when Mr NQN would simultaneously step out of the shorts or pants and the underpants leaving two holes where the legs would be. As if his body have evaporated into thin air while standing in the shorts. I recall Queen Viv’s bemusement and my embarrassment at seeing one. I missed it completely as he had left it around the corner near the front door.

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A first day at a job can be intimidating. Especially when you start work at an advertising agency whose unofficial motto is to “Work hard, party hard.” On my first day at an agency I was led around and introduced to each department. And the creative interactive department, once the realm for geeky types had morphed into the “cool” area.

The person showing me around whispered to me “This is the interactive creative director. Don’t worry if he doesn’t like you,” which didn’t help my nerves. He was small in stature with a rounded face and body and mischievous blue eyes. He regarded me for a moment and stroked his chin.

“Morticia!!!” he said, delightedly.

I don’t know what on earth possessed me to do it but I held out my hand and in a similarly delighted tone I said “Pugsly!!!” He threw back his head and laughed and grabbed my hand and kissed it Gomez style and every time I saw him since we exchanged his Morticia Pugsley conversation.

And as someone that thinks that Halloween, like Christmas is far too infrequent at once a year, when I heard that the Addams Family musical was coming to Sydney and that Sofitel, the official sponsor hotel was creating their very own Addams Family Afternoon Tea complete with an entire suite decorated in the Addams Family style, I jumped on my broomstick immediately.

At the time that it was built in 1969 the building that the Sofitel sits in was the tallest building in the Southern Hemisphere. Originally built to put up Qantas crew, the rooms in the front of the hotel are larger than the rooms in the back. Many parts of the hotel are heritage listed including the fifth floor courtyard, the marble floors and ceilings and the pineapple themed wallpaper.

The Addams Family hotel and high tea package is very reasonably priced indeed at $235 per person a night twin share and this includes overnight accommodation in the specially designed prestige suite (the highest level suite below their presidential equivalent), an A reserve ticket to the show, a souvenir program and a coffee table book called “The Addams Family: An Evilution” by Charles Addams, the creator of The Addams Family.

Also included in the package is Club Sofitel access (which has complimentary drinks, afternoon tea, canapes and pre dinner drinks), breakfast for two, an Addams Family high tea for two with matching cocktails, late checkout, free shirt pressing and free wifi. You can also just book the high tea and the show at $134 a person which includes an A reserve ticket or just the high tea itself which is $59 a person. All available from the 10th-28th March.

So, what is in the Addams Family afternoon tea? It is held in the Soiree lounge downstairs which we are told will also feature a smoke machine to spook it up. First to come out are the cocktails. There is a choice of two including ‘Morticia’s Martini’, a dark cranberry based cocktail made with Absolut Kurant and crème de cassis. The cocktail is finished with a ghoulish eyeball made of a fresh blueberry and strawberry jam stuffed into a lychee.

The elegantly tall Morticia shaped cocktail is ‘Pugsley’s Poison’ which is said to be a bubbling potion, made with Midori, sparkling wine and garnished with a rim of faux blood dripping down the sides. The finger tip is a sugar cube soaked in grenadine to give it a bloody look. I liked them both but preferred the flavour of Pugsley’s Poison and the look of Morticia’s Martini.

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Dear Reader, once upon a time, I used to wish for certain things around birthdays and Christmas:

• To receive a Barbie Fashion Face-you can see my penchant for over applying makeup started here…
• To see snow.
• To ice skate-that was beyond sticking freezer bags on your feet and sliding around on the carpeted floor in the house (please tell me I’m not the only one that did this?).
• To have a birthday with a piñata. The idea of bashing about something and having lollies and candy rain down on top of my friends and I was like the childhood version of Oprah’s “You get a car!!” moment. What seven year old kid needed a car? Candy was a much more tradeable commodity. And bashing about a paper mache structure helped work off some of that red cordial buzz.

Can you guess where we are going with these?

When I first saw some piñata cookies on Pinterest that contained a little sprinkling of mini m&m’s I was instantly delighted, my predilection for pinatas exposed. I thought the idea would be perfect for Christmas where I would make a Christmas gift version where you would bite into the 3D model of a Christmas gift made out of cookie and out would pour a little sweet surprise.

Surprise! You get a car! I mean you get candy!

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