Our latest flavour is just like a comforting mug of hot cider! If mugs of cider were small, round, really pretty and full of buttercream blended with apple compote and cinnamon...
Cinnamon is such a quintessential fall spice, and it has a very long, illustrious and colourful history! Here are a few fun and interesting cinnamon facts for your enjoyment:
1. Cinnamon comes from the bark of the cinnamon tree.
2. The cinnamon tree can grow up to 60 feet.
3. Cinnamon sticks are also called quills.
4. Ancient Egyptians used cinnamon medicinally and as a flavouring in food and beverages.
5. Cinnamon was used on funeral pyres in Ancient Rome. In 65 AD, Nero burned a year’s supply of cinnamon at his second wife Poppaea Sabina’s funeral in order to show the depth of his grief.
6. Cinnamon is a powerful antioxidant that aids in controlling blood sugar.
7. In the Middle Ages, cinnamon was only affordable by the wealthy elite of society. A person’s social rank could be determined by the number of spices they could afford.
8. Cinnamon compliments both sweet and salty dishes (and drinks).
9. And this last one is a doozy, but is pretty fun: There was an ancient belief in a Cinnamon Bird that supposedly lived in Arabia, and used cinnamon to build its nests. Herodotus wrote that these birds flew to an unknown land to collect the cinnamon and took it back with them to Arabia. The Arabians ostensibly got cinnamon from the birds by tempting them with large chunks of raw meat—the birds took the heavy pieces of meat back to their nests, which caused the nests to fall and the cinnamon to rain down so it could be collected by the people.