— Kathleen Campbell

There are, you know, we go over the kinds of sweetness in a unit in essential vegan desserts because there is no one size fits all. So there are liquid sweeteners and there are granulated sweeteners. And within those two categories there are big differences. I don't use white sugar. White sugar is 99.9% pure. It's been bleached, everything's been taken out of it. And it's the only edible food substance meaning not poisonous that we put into our mouth. That doesn't need to be digested. It just goes in, hits your pancreas, depletes some of your B vitamins and so on. So I use, let's see, I'll show you a couple kinds. This is coconut sugar, which I have in this container because coconut sugar is, has a large crystal and needs to be ground. This is going to turn, I use this in place of brown sugar and it is going to turn your desserts. I mean, you're not going to see it in a chocolate cake. You're gonna see it in a blondie that it's darker and it has that molasses taste. This is ana ground because again, the crystal is very large. You see, I keep, I keep these sweeteners. I've got these edible silica gel because these sweeteners are haven't been stripped and they're humectant, they hold moisture. So this is actually organic cane with all of the molasses intact. So that's another sweetener with a definite flavor also like brown sugar and color. And then I have here in my magic trick. All right, so this is what I use. This is cane sugar. This is cane sugar that has been lightly ground and I don't know if you can tell, but it's definitely not white because some of the molasses that's inherent in the cane remains in this, uh, you to use, um, to use a date paste, which I'm assuming is what you mean in a, in a sugar cookie. It's going to be dark for sure. So I think you know, what you can do is try, maybe try a lighter colored fruit paste like an apricot, I mean a mango, it's gonna give, there's going to be a flavor attached to that. Sometimes you can't sub, you know, the liquid sweeteners I use primarily are maple, dark maple used to be called grade B. It's now grade a dark. Um, I know where maple comes from. I use some date syrup, which is called Solan. I happen to love sorghum, which is, um, from the sorghum plant. It, it's delicious. Both the date syrup and the sorghum have a very definite flavor. I like rice syrup, which tastes like honey to me. And I use a little bit of agave in very small quantities. They are not one for one. And the fact is, you really have to learn how to use these sweeteners when they're, when one is appropriate and not another.