Evangeline Gearheart's Journal Entry #27

The Alchemist of Sweetness

Spring brought brightness, but it also brought a challenge Evangeline hadn’t anticipated: sweetness.

People wanted lighter treats as the days grew longer. Something less heavy than winter chocolate, something that didn’t cling to the palate like velvet but instead lifted, brightened, refreshed. And Evangeline — ever the perfectionist, ever the seeker — decided she would explore natural sweeteners.

Not because she needed to.But because she wanted to understand sweetness itself.To refine it. To honour it.

Her first attempt was with stevia.

The chocolate set beautifully, its surface smooth and glossy. She broke a piece, admired the clean snap, and placed it on her tongue.

The flavour hit her like a betrayal.

A metallic tang bloomed at the back of her mouth, sharp and cold, as though she’d licked the inside of a copper pipe. She spat it out so quickly her baker friend nearly dropped a tray of scones laughing.

“Stevia is cancelled,” Evangeline declared, wiping her tongue with a tea towel.

Next came monk fruit. It smelled promising — sweet, earthy, almost caramel‑like. But the taste… oh, the taste. It lingered like damp soil after rain, clinging to the palate in a way that made her grimace.

She wrote in her notebook:

• Stevia: tastes like pocket change.

• Monk fruit: tastes like the ground.

• Agave: too thin, ruins texture.

• Date syrup: lovely but overpowering.

Her corner of the bakery began to resemble an apothecary — jars of powders, syrups, extracts, and one very determined chocolatier.

But she didn’t stop.

If anything, the failures sharpened her resolve.

She tried coconut sugar next.It gave the chocolate a deep, caramel warmth — beautiful, but too heavy for the delicate spring flavours she wanted. It turned her elderflower truffles into something that tasted like burnt toffee wearing a floral hat.

Honey was next.She loved honey.But honey did not love chocolate.

It seized the mixture unless she coaxed it in drop by drop, and even then the texture became unpredictable — sometimes silky, sometimes grainy, sometimes refusing to set at all.

Her baker friend found her one evening sitting cross‑legged on the floor, surrounded by bowls and spoons and half‑finished experiments. The moonlight through the bakery window made the scene look like an alchemist’s workshop.

“You’re trying to reinvent sweetness,” her friend said gently, handing her a mug of tea.

“I’m trying to understand it,” Evangeline murmured, rubbing her eyes.

“You’re close.”

“I don’t feel close.”

“That’s how you know you are.”

And somehow, that helped.

She stayed up late that night, stirring, tasting, adjusting, rejecting.The bakery was quiet except for the hum of the refrigerators and the occasional creak of settling wood. Outside, the street was empty, the lamplight casting long shadows across the cobblestones.

She tried maple syrup.Too strong.She tried barley malt.Too savoury.She tried coconut nectar. Too sticky.

By the end of the week, she had tasted more sweeteners than any human should. Some left a metallic sting. Some tasted like dirt. Some tasted like nothing at all. And some tasted like everything at once — a confusing, overwhelming sweetness that made her question her life choices.

But she learned something important:

Chocolate didn’t need to be reinvented.It needed to be complemented.

And that realisation settled in her chest like a seed waiting for the right moment to sprout.