Pumpkin Passion

I recently finished reading the book Sugar Queen by Sarah Addison Allen. I’d say that it was mostly fluff and read more like a movie script than a novel but it was an enjoyable lazy summer read. Mostly I liked the whimsy of it. There was a woman hiding in a closet for almost the entire story, books that would appear out of nowhere and follow one of the characters around town, a possibly magical red sweater, and some fantastical romances.

One of the main story lines is a secret closet. In the main character’s closet is a small entrance to another closet that’s located in a different room. The main entrance to the secret closet is blocked by a giant armoire. No one else uses the closet or remembers the other entrance. In the closet, she stores travel magazines, romance novels, and lots and lots of candy that she has to sneak into the house and hide from her controlling mother. It got me to thinking about what I would hide if I had my own secret closet. There’s no use in storing candy in my secret closet because I’d eat all of it the same day I brought it in. Cupcakes wouldn’t preserve well and neither would pumpkin pies. I think I’d want to fill it with a collection of babushka dolls and Maneki Neko Beckoning Cats mixed with a few garden gnomes thrown in for the sake of being eclectic. A secret closet has so many possibilities!

I picked up the book while at Costco, mostly because I liked the cover and the title. I’d never heard of the author before. When I flipped open the book to peruse its pages, I opened it to this page:

Of course I had to buy it.

I actually had no idea what a pumpkin mellowcreme was until I did a google search. I was imagining something likes those Idaho Spuds candy bars; something fluffy with pumpkin flavor inside covered in chocolate with a sprinkling of pecans on the outside. Nope! It’s those tiny candy pumpkin that taste like candy corn. They’re only available around Halloween time. Those things make my teeth hurt just thinking about them. My initial guess was that it only takes four ingredients to make the pumkin mellowcreme: sugar, high fructose corn syrup, green food coloring and orange food coloring. I was close; they also contain honey. They taste absolutely nothing like pumpkins.

What I also learned from my google search is that people actually go nuts over these things. There’s even an entire website devoted to the pumpkin mellowcreme. Their tagline is “Debunking the myth that eating them incessantly will kill you.” They have a poem, discussion board, photos, and information on the tiny-pumpkin-looking-tooth-decayers. I thought my blog was super nichey but this one makes me look like a generalist!

Sugar Queen is a thumbs up as a mellow read and pumpkin mellowcremes are a thumbs up only as a cute pumpkin cupcake topper.