Pumpkin Spice Latte (a recipe post)

Hello, blog readers. I am Sarah, Andrew's wife. We are doing a special Creepy Days thing here where we post things that are fall-themed / Halloween-themed. I offered to Andrew that I would help out with recipes, because I am the recipe person in our relationship. [This is true. I do most of the cooking, but my inclination, often, is to just wing it. Sarah researches and provides recipes to keep me more on track.] So here is your first recipe for Creepy Days: Homemade Pumpkin Spice Latte!

First, what is a pumpkin spice latte? Historically, it's a flavored espresso drink invented by Starbucks and first sold in 2003. [Link]  It has a pretty rabid fan following, and also inspires non-fans to become snarky about "the PSL" (as those in the know dub it, apparently). I don't really know why people become snarky about it, because 1. it's a coffee drink that no one is forcing anyone else to drink, 2. "pumpkin spice" is a delicious melange of flavors generally, 3. the PSL feels autumnal, right? are these people who are snarking actually FALL-haters, and wouldn't that mean they are anti-American?? 4. the eggnog latte seems to slip under everyone's radar and not come in for any abuse at all, despite being a legitimately gross concept, [She says this in a house in which all of her children love eggnog and, though none of them have discovered having it as coffee, they will probably love that, too.] and 5. who even has enough energy to waste on getting cranky about an espresso drink, unless they are in a circumstance where the barista just spit in it? Oh you're not in that circumstance? Then maybe stop being snarky about freakin' coffee!

Whew! OK. I myself do not care for the PSL as it is formulated by Starbucks; however, I am not going to snark at people who like it that way. More power to them in their chosen method of enjoying the seasonal spirit of autumn. For my own preferences, I want a PSL that is more pumpkin-y and less sweet. A lot less sweet, both because I don't like things that are overly sweet and also because I want to avoid consuming a lot of sugar. If you like the idea of the PSL but you would prefer not to have to visit your dentist and cardiologist after each one you consume, then this recipe may be right up your alley.

Now, this recipe is more of a formula than a recipe per se. I recommend that you adjust the formula components to suit your own desire; this could take experimentation. Delicious experimentation. [We do a lot of that.] I consider that a feature rather than a bug as regards this recipe. So does Andrew.

Pumpkin Spice Latte (PSL) Formula

Pumpkin flavor. Once upon a time, the Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte did not contain any actual pumpkin, rather it was artificially flavored. In 2015, in response to consumer pressure about the drink not containing "real" pumpkin, it was reformulated to contain some quantity of pumpkin; Starbucks doesn't indicate how much. To me, this is not a knock against the drink itself (because, I mean, come on--any of Starbucks' sweetened drinks are really just dessert in liquid form, and extracts are often used in desserts to supplement flavor), though to some people it might matter. Rather, I say this in order to make you aware that you have two basic options as regards flavoring your own personal PSL:

• Pumpkin flavor. Pros: Can be purchased here from my favorite baking-supply company, King Arthur Flour; using a very small amount will apparently give you a big flavor; won't add any texture to your drink as real pumpkin does. Cons: Waiting for your flavor to reach you in the mail; isn't "real pumpkin."

• Real pumpkin. Pros: It's real pumpkin!; it's easy to find in the stores this time of year; adds some Vitamin A and other nutrients to your coffee drink. Cons: It will add texture to your drink, depending on how much you add in; some people don't like the "raw" taste of it (you can cook it before using it in your drink if that is an issue). [We go for texture. Just sayin'.]

Milk base. Totally up to you what to use here. If you like your lattes made with milk, do that; if you prefer almond milk or coconut milk or something else, that is also fine. Just maybe no goat's milk, that doesn't seem like such a great idea.

Coffee. Do you have an espresso machine? Use a shot of espresso! [If you don't have an espresso machine, you should totally get one. It's well worth it and will provide you a reason to redecorate.] Do you keep instant coffee in your cupboard? It's OK to use that too! (We have both, because we love espresso but sometimes we're lazy and/or I need the instant for baking with.) Or are you a kid or someone else who hates the taste of coffee? NO COFFEE FOR YOU!

Sweetness. Andrew and I are sugar-avoiders, so I use sucralose to sweeten our homemade PSLs; a little less for him, a little more for me. You can use sugar or honey or stevia or maple syrup (that sounds interesting!) or agave or whatever you want. I recommend starting with less and going to more because, as my mom always said, "You can put more in, but you can't take it out." (Good advice for cooking AND pretty good advice for managing your retirement account, too.)

Spices. If you have "pumpkin pie spice" in your cupboard already, you may as well use that. If not--e.g., if you are a crazy baker like me [She is the baker; I just do the cooking.] and have a collection of 30+ spices and herbs that are getting regularly used (ok, except for the ghost chile curry powder that Andrew bought on a whim, that stuff is never going to get used up because no one in our household, mysteriously, wants to have their tongue burned off) [Not true! I use it when I make things that require curry powder! It's just that I didn't buy it until the end of our run on Indian food experimentation so haven't had a lot of opportunities to use it since then.]...anyway, if you have the individual spices you can just use those, and if you have the individual spices then you also probably know that you want to be using some combination of cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, cloves, and/or allspice. Or, if you enjoy masala chai (AKA "chai tea" to Americans), a bit of cardamom will add that flavor. Or try turmeric and black pepper if you're feeling adventurous and want to add an extra dash of warm color and heat to your PSL (black pepper boosts the beneficial effects of turmeric).

Vanilla extract. Why a flavor other than pumpkin and spice and coffee? Vanilla is a great balancer and rounder of other flavors.

Salt. Salt is an enhancer of other flavors. It also moderates the bitterness of coffee.

Whipped cream. Totally optional, unless you are our daughter, in which case whipped cream is literally the most important part of this drink or, indeed, of any dessert. In fact, if we were to allow her to put whipped cream on her breakfast cereal, she would probably be really eager to do that; but please, no one put that idea into her head, because we are already exhausted from saying "NO, YOU MAY NOT PUT WHIPPED CREAM ON YOUR WHIPPED CREAM, THAT IS ENOUGH WHIPPED CREAM."

Pumpkin Spice Latte - 2 servings

4 oz canned pumpkin

1 tsp cinnamon

1/4 tsp ginger

1/4 to 1/2 tsp blend of other spices such as cloves, nutmeg, mace, allspice, cardamom, black pepper, turmeric

2 cups milk

2 to 3 tbsp sugar or substitute

2 tbsp vanilla extract

1/4 tsp salt

1 to 2 shots espresso

In a small saucepan, heat up the pumpkin, along with your chosen blend of spices.

Add in milk, sugar, vanilla, and salt. Stir to combine, then heat up. If you're using instant coffee instead of espresso, this is the time to add it in to your mixture, so that it dissolves. If you want your drink frothy, you can use a hand-held blender to do that when the milk is warmed up.

Pull espresso shots and pour into your favorite mugs. Top with the latte mixture, and whipped cream if that's your thing.

Then, enjoy your fall-themed hot beverage!

No Sugar Added (part 2): The Coffee Solution

I have a terrible confession to make. I'm barely a writer. I know  this is true because I don't like coffee. I also don't like the only acceptable substitute: tea. That's not to say that I don't occasionally partake of these substances. I even, occasionally, want a cup of tea, but I don't really drink these on a regular basis or from any habitual desire to do so. That  means I don't sit down at the computer in the morning with my cup of liquefied caffeine to get to work. It also means that I don't drag my laptop (which is, at the moment, a glorified paper weight, but that's another story) to the cafe to enjoy some foreign ambiance while I sip a beverage and work.

In fact, just the other day, my wife and I were at our favorite local cafe, and I noticed a number of women sitting with their laptops and mostly empty cups just writing away. I'll explain the whole cafe thing in a moment. I commented that I just didn't get that whole thing with the cafe and the laptops; my wife looked at me like I was crazy. I don't ever see men doing that, though, so, maybe, that's more of a female thing than a male thing. At any rate, my caffeine choice has always been soda... but, of course, I gave that up. No sugar equals no soda, because 0 calorie sodas are nasty and, actually, just as bad for you, or worse, than the ones with sugar.

When I first came to California, my experience with coffee extended only to its smell. I love the smell of coffee brewing. Growing up on  the farm, I used to wake up to that smell. Okay, well, that's almost true.  My grandparents had a farm in East Texas, and I spent a lot of time there as a kid. A lot. My grandmother was a morning person, and the first thing she did every morning was set the coffee to brewing. No one else drank it. Not my grandfather. Not my mother. Not my father. I loved waking up to that smell. But I never developed a desire for the actual substance.

When I moved out to CA, there were two things my wife wanted to get me into: alcohol (that sounds bad, but no one wants to drink alone, or so I've heard) and coffee. No, I'd never had a drop of alcohol before I moved out here, and I've still never been drunk. Or even tipsy, much to my wife's dismay. She has set a goal for herself of getting my tipsy, but, so far, she hasn't managed it. Okay, there was this one time while I was still in Louisiana that I got tipsy, but it wasn't exactly alcohol related and is a story for another time.

Coffee, though, was a big issue. Even though I was willing to go sit around in cafes with her while she had coffee, she didn't like it that I wasn't having anything, so it wasn't a satisfying experience for her. After years of training, she worked me up to mochas. Starbucks mochas with only one shot of espresso (instead of the normal 2) and a lot of sugar. Not that I had extra sugar added, I didn't, but their drinks commonly have more sugar than a can of soda. In fact, Starbucks is, possibly, the most sugar saturated place I know of that isn't an actual dessert shop.

Then...? Then, we cut (processed) sugar from our diets.

As you might imagine, this caused considerable problems with  the whole cafe thing. Although we didn't know it at first. Initially, when we dropped sugar, my wife also dropped caffeine in an effort to get her whole diet stabilized. The caffeine wasn't an issue for me since I'd quit drinking soda, which hardly counts as having caffeine, anyway. It was months and months before we hit a coffee shop again. Starbucks. A latte for my wife (no sugar in those), a mocha for me, because I (still) can't do lattes.

Oh. My. Gosh. I cannot describe for you the amount of sweet in that mocha. It was... horrendous. I wasn't able to make it through a third of it. That's the thing, though; when I was having sugar all the time, Starbucks seemed perfectly normal to me, just like it seems perfectly normal to virtually everyone else in the USA. But after going off of sugar for months, all I could taste was the sugar. And it was just too much.

Just to throw this in, the average sugar consumption per year of someone living in the USA is currently over 125 pounds. That's up 4-5 times what it was just a few decades ago. You know in those old TV shows when the dad catches his son smoking and he makes him smoke a whole pack all at once to show him how horrible it is? I feel like we should sort of do that with sugar. Give people their yearly allotment and tell them to eat up. All of it. Right now. I could go on to talk about how sugar consumption is linked to all sorts of health problems, including cancer and especially breast cancer, but, instead, I will just link this article for you: Is Sugar Toxic? Just to warn you: it's long, and it's kind of scary.

All of this lead to figuring out how to make mochas at home that didn't include sugar. I do have a morning drink, now: hot chocolate. Peppermint hot chocolate. Occasionally, I'll throw some coffee in to make it a mocha instead, but that's never more than once or twice a week (when I accidentally pour too much peppermint in and need something to cut the taste). Oh, and let me just be clear, here; I'm not talking about little hot cocoa packets. Those have sugar. This is something I make from baking cocoa sweetened with honey. I'll get back to that in a moment. The recipe, that is.

And as another aside, I just want to say that honey is, like, a miracle food. Some of it. There's actually a type of honey from Australia that can, literally, be rubbed on open wounds to promote healing. Very quick healing. Like Wolverine regeneration type of healing. Okay, so that's probably stretching it a bit, but still... It's too bad we're killing off all of the bees that make this amazing stuff. (And, no, I'm not going to argue the validity of honey vs sugar. Maybe some other time. Trust me, they're not the same. Rub some sugar on an open wound and see if does more than just sting.)

We did, also, find a cafe we can (kind of) frequent. They have what's called an Aztec mocha. It's spicy! Although not really spicy enough for me. More than adequate for your average consumer, though. People blame that on me growing up in Louisiana, the love of the spicy, although I can't see it. We didn't do spicy food when I was a kid. At any rate, it's not too sweet, and we can manage one a week together. On Sunday mornings. That's pretty close to the extent of processed sugar we get. Don't get me started on the kids, though. Especially my daughter. The girl is a hummingbird. Not that we provide her the sugar... Let me just say that for a school that's fairly "hippie," there is a constant stream of sugary goods in that place. Not to mention the relatives at holidays. And after years, yes, years, of going on about "no sugar," they persist in doing things like giving our kids Easter baskets full of enough sugar to last them months. >sigh< [My mom doesn't even live here, and she's constantly mailing my kids hoards of candy (which they never see, because it goes straight into the trash).] At least one of them did better this year, though, by providing a brown paper bunny in their baskets instead of the actual chocolate bunny.

The sugar thing is a constant struggle. It inundates our society. We can't go out to eat and really enjoy it, because everything is too sweet. Even the salad. Yes, salads! It's a good thing I'm a good cook, because the awesome part of that is that we have problems finding anywhere to eat that makes food as good as what I make, so it makes it easier to not eat out since we know we're just going to be disappointed. That doesn't mean my wife doesn't have to remind me of that when I don't feel like cooking, though.


I mentioned in  part one of this the disbelief with which people respond to the idea of cutting sugar from their diets. The most common phrase is "I could never do that." I imagine that that would be the same phrase that people would use about cutting out most of the destructive habits we have as a society. Like dropping to owning only one car. "I could never do that." Or actually using cell phones for emergencies only. "I could never do that." Getting rid of cable/satellite television. "I could never do that."

We only have two cars, right now, because my mother-in-law died last fall and left us her Prius. Prior to that, we spent 7 or 8 years with just one vehicle. We even spent a couple of months with no vehicle after our van blew up (yes, blew up), last summer. We haven't had cell phones in more than 5 years. We've never had cable television in the 14 years my wife and I have been together.

Yes, you might just say that we are rather contrary people, but we prefer to do things our own way. I was lucky to find someone that's contrary in the same ways I am, although that contrariness does cause us to butt heads more frequently than I'm sure we like. More than I like, at any rate.

Of course, this is not without its negative consequences in the writing field. But that's probably a whole different post...

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Because I know some of you are interested, or, at least, one of you, I will now go about explaining how to make hot chocolate without sugar along with how to make the spicy mocha. Disclaimer: I really like dark chocolate, much darker than my wife likes. She says my hot chocolate is too bitter, so be aware before you try this at home. However, my kids, who love the sweet, prefer my hot chocolate to hers.

The most important part of the hot chocolate is the cocoa. I've tested a variety of brands, and, unfortunately, the best is not available in stores. That I know of. As far as I know you have to order it. I prefer King Arthur's Double-Dutch Dark Cocoa as my base (my wife uses King Arthur's Black Cocoa). Here's the real trick, though, you can't use just one type of cocoa. Not if you want the superior hot chocolate. My wife and I both use Ghirardelli's Unsweetened Cocoa as our second. If you need a fall back, the Ghirardelli's works well with Nestle's. Forget Hershey, though. Seriously.

Now that you've worked out your cocoa blend, I'll hit you with the next obstacle: my wife and I have an electronic kitchen scale that we use for things like this, because it's easier to keep your proportions the same with the scale than by measuring by volume. And you can do it right in your drinking vessel, if you have a scale that tares. So...

You need to start with 1 ounce of cocoa. I use a ratio of about .7/.3 (Double-Dutch/Ghirardelli)

The honey... my wife no longer uses honey in hers; she's switched to sucralose. However, when she did use honey, she used 1.2 ounces. I tend to only use .8 ounces (unless I'm not paying attention and squirt too much in). [If you want to make it a peppermint hot chocolate, this when you add in the peppermint extract - .05 ounces. If you hit .1, it tends to make it too strong.]

Okay, this is very important. Add in about 1.65 ounces of milk. We use non-fat, but that's really up to you, I guess. Whatever you do, do not go over 2 ounces of milk. You need to mix the cocoa and milk into a paste, a smooth paste, and, if you put too much milk in, you'll get little blobs of floating cocoa that won't mix. These explode in the heating stage and will cause your yummy beverage to boil over in the microwave. Okay, after creating your cocoa paste, add more milk in to bring your total milk up to 12 ounces. Stir your paste into your milk and heat for 2 minutes your radiation device.

That's your basic hot chocolate (or peppermint hot chocolate). Well, my basic hot chocolate. Instant coffee can, of course, be added, at this point, if you want a mocha instead.

Now... let's step back a moment... the directions change just a little bit if you want a spicy mocha. And trust me, you want a spicy mocha, not a spicy hot chocolate.

After you've added your cocoa to your mug but before you add the honey, you have to add the spiciness. This is a little complicated. In my opinion, you need three types of pepper and cinnamon. The best type of cinnamon to use is Vietnamese cinnamon, which can also be found at Safeway under the name of Saigon cinnamon. Regular cinnamon works, too, it's just not quite as good. Here's how I do it:
Cinnamon - .05 ounces
Cayenne pepper - a gentle sprinkling, enough to see it spread over the cinnamon
Chipotle chili pepper - twice as much as you used of the cayenne or thereabouts
Ancho chili pepper - this is kind of your base pepper. You need to add enough to bring your total weight (starting with the cinnamon) up to .1 ounce and then add a little extra. Not enough to bring it up to .15, though, although it's not a disaster if you do.
Tare your scale and pick back up with the honey.

No, I don't know why it makes a difference which order you do the honey, all I can tell you is that it does make a difference. The spicy stuff doesn't mix in as well when you put the honey in first.

So there you have it! I hope all of that isn't too complicated. If you try it out, any of it, you'll have to let me know!