Y’all! I’m ready for fall! And anything with pumpkin in the title! I’m always so excited for that first Starbucks pumpkin spice latte. My joy is shortlived because exactly 2 seconds after that first swallow, regret sets in. I cannot justify a $5 cup of coffee!

Have you ever added up what you spend on coffee every month? I wonder if diner owners in the 1950’s could predict that a 25¢ cup of coffee would eventually bring in $5 or more. Who’da thunk it? Mr. Starbucks assigned value to a simple cup of coffee and we went along. Marketing intrigues me.

We lived in Europe for a time, several years back. Interestingly, Europeans do not enjoy their coffee on the run. There’s no such thing as a ‘to-go’ cup. You sit at a cafe with a ceramic cup and slow your butt down. You make time for the joy of a quiet moment. I miss living in Germany.

Germans do not ‘do’ sugar as we do. They will typically consume a fraction of what we do in America. Deserts are much less sweet. I’m really working on this lately, as I’m discovering that sugar (or any carb) sets off my hot flashes. (For those of you that are riding the menopausal rollercoaster, have you found this true for yourselves?)

Pumpkin is actually very healthy! It’s the sugar that brings us all down! (And that’s after the initial ‘sugar high’!)

So, I experimented with different pumpkin spice recipes for my own creamer, and I only added 2 tablespoons of sugar. You can increase the sugar if you so wish.