Happy National Pumpkin Day!

Pumpkins have become the symbol of October, not just for Halloween, but also for heralding the most beautiful season of all: Fall. Today is National Pumpkin Day, and we’re celebrating the squash that has become ubiquitous with the Autumn season.
Pumpkins, native to good ol’ North America, crop up a lot in our folklore: Cinderella, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater. They’re everywhere and used for everything. The most famous, of course, is pumpkin pie. The first pumpkin pie is rumoured to have come about by the American colonists, who cut the top of the pumpkin, threw some milk, spices, and honey into the pumpkin, and baked it on the hot coals of a fire.
We’ve come a long way in our pumpkin obsession. The largest pumpkin pie ever baked used 80 pounds of pumpkin, 12 dozen eggs, and 36 pounds of sugar and took 6 hours to bake. That’s a pretty far stretch from the stuffed pumpkin days of the colonists. We’ve also figured out how to put pumpkin in everything: bagels, muffins, pancakes, coffee (Pumpkin Spice Latte, anyone?), soup, cinnamon rolls, and risotto.
Pumpkin is a kind of bland food by itself- it needs a little pizzazz added. In the 1950s McCormick started selling “pumpkin pie spice,” with the cinnamon, ginger, allspice, nutmeg, and cloves pre-mixed. Now “pumpkin pie spice” has become “pumpkin spice,” and sometimes dishes that feature “pumpkin spice” don’t even have pumpkin in them! Here at Sunny Street we pump (pun intended) our famous Pumpkin Spice Pancakes and Pumpkin Crumb Muffins with real pumpkin.
Come enjoy the taste of Fall at your nearest Sunny Street Cafe, and Happy National Pumpkin Day! And pop quiz: how many times did we manage to say “pumpkin” in this blog post?
 

-Anna Hetzel, Content Manager