Four out of Five Pumpkin Pie Spices Come from Trees. Do You Know Which?
Allspice. Cinnamon. Cloves. Ginger. Nutmeg. Those are the five spices in pumpkin spice, a traditional spice for flavoring a pumpkin pie.
Pumpkin spice has become wildly popular in many non-pie foods in the fall season. Rather a lot of people seem to want pumpkin-spice flavored everything!
Some people have even been searching the Uncle Goose site for pumpkin spice blocks. Now, your Uncle Goose has three block sets with pumpkin images on them.
1. Uncle Goose Groovy Ghoulies feature a few grinning Jack O'Lanterns.
2. Our Perpetual Calendar has a pumpkin on it, too.
3. And our Lights, Camera, Action Blocks contain one pumpkin-based icon on the Holiday genre block.
But we definitely keep the five pumpkin spices out of our basswood blocks!
Nonetheless, Uncle Goose blocks DO have something in common with pumpkin pie spice. The all-natural ingredients in pumpkin pie spice come from plants, just like your Uncle Goose blocks.
Further, 4 of the 5 pumpkin pie spices come from a tree! Can you guess which? Go ahead and guess, and we’ll put the answer below this image:
ANSWER: Which 4 pumpkin pie spices come from a tree? Allspice, cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg.
These spices not only come from four different trees, they also come from four different parts of the tree! Allspice is a berry, cinnamon is bark, clove comes from flower buds, and nutmeg is a seed.
Unlike our blocks, these spices all come from tropical trees. But your Uncle Goose makes blocks only from Midwestern basswood trees.
But what about the remaining spice, ginger? It’s a tropical plant, too: but we can grow it here in Michigan, too.
And here’s a fun fact: while we call it a “ginger root” — it’s not actually a root. It’s a rhizome, or an underground stem of the ginger plant.
So while your Uncle Goose doesn’t have any pumpkin spice blocks, we do have 4 points of connection with the popular spice:
1. We’re made from all natural plant ingredients
2. We’re mostly made from trees
3. Groovy Ghoulies, Perpetual Calendar, and Lights, Camera, Action! have pumpkins
4. We have another set featuring Halloween Letters
But please keep pumpkin spices off your blocks. You don’t want to eat them! And you won't want them to get dirty!
Happy Autumn!