ALL HAIL THE CUPCAKE GODDESSES! ALL HAIL THE SISTERS McMULLEN!

Today I walked down to the Sisters McMullen's Cupcake Corner, which, despite its name, not only serves cupcakes, but the best danish and cookies in town. I had been longing to try their wares ever since they took up residence in the tiny storefront facing the square at the heart of downtown, which used to house Bonnie's Little Tobacco Shop. Though I'll always feel a little twinge of nostalgia for Bonnie's, I have to admit, I was excited to see the Sisters McMullen taking up residence, rather than another faux-folksy kitsch shop.

I fell in love with the Sisters bakery back when you had to drive 20 minutes outside town to get a taste of their mindblowingly good doughnuts. Those doughnuts were so light and crisp. The dough itself was sweet, the pastry lightly powdered with sugar, never drowned in corn-syrupy glaze. Sisters McMullen doughnuts are the next best thing to a genuine Cafe du Monde beignet.

Thus far, Jeremy and I have tried a blueberry-cream cheese danish, a carrot cupcake and a chocolate orange cupcake. The carrot cupcake tasted a lot like our wedding cake - not surprising since our wedding cake was a carrot cake from the Sisters McMullen - and the chocolate orange cupcake was yummy, but almost too sweet.

The danish was pure heaven, though: sweet and flaky dough with a subtle glaze, just the right amount of cream cheese, and real blueberries. We happened to make our visit to buy the danish just as the town was gearing up for our town's Caribbean arts and music festival, so as we were digging into the pastry, a marching band struck up on the street right outside the plate glass windows. We ate our danish to a joyous procession of drums, trumpets, and a high school flag line. I felt like I had suddenly stepped into one of those commercials where the woman takes a bite of margarine, and suddenly she's transported to a tropical isle full of white sand and beautiful people.

Actually, I think a cupcake shop with a marching band trumps a tropical isle and margarine. The sand would probably stick to your bagel.

THE WORST MUTANT

My electromagnetic field has been acting up again this week. I've managed to erase messages from the answering machine simply by standing beside it, and change the radio station back and forth between two stations by walking from one side of the bedroom to the other. This is the worst it's been since the time in college when I miserably failed to learn Excel, because I made the lab computer malfunction any time I got within a radius of 2 feet.

Since all the significant milestones in my life at which my parents would have informed me of my alien heritage have passed, it's time to accept the truth. I must have been bio-engineered by some shadowy arm of the government, entrusted to my parents for safekeeping, and then forgotten by the now-defunct research program that begat me. Either that, or I'm actually a Scanner, in which case my pyrokinesis should be kicking in any time now.

"Maybe you're a mutant," Jeremy suggested after the episode with the answering machine.

"And these are my powers?" I said. "Short-circuiting minor appliances and making people reboot their computers? I can't even use them to fight evil. I only get in my own way! Worst mutant powers ever."

At least for the time being, I don't seem to be killing my car, or, say, overloading any power substations. When the neighborhood starts having blackouts every time I take an evening stroll, I'll start to worry. Then it'll be time to set up my yurt in the wilderness and wait for the scientists to come.