Sweet Hearts for my Sweetheart

Posted June 3, 2023

Happy pride month, my friends!

It seems that I am only capable of posting near dates celebrating how gay and/or transgender I am, and for that I half-heartedly apologize. I hope to start updating on a more consistent basis from now on!

With that said, let me tell you about my day.

My wife and I treat the first of June as a second Valentine’s Day, except less expensive and no promise of clearance-aisle candy the next day. It’s a good excuse for a bit of gift-giving! Last year, my beloved Alice surprised me with the loveliest flowers — preserved in resin, in the shape of a human skull! I believe she said it was an art piece symbolizing the fleeting nature of human life juxtaposed to the immortality of love? I think? Regardless of the meaning behind it, the skull has had a space on the living room bookshelf ever since.

On the other side of things…I am not the best gift giver. Typically, I’ll treat us to a nice dinner, which she always enjoys, but it’s not exactly human skull levels of romantic. This year, I knew I’d have to get creative.

I suppose you could call my wife a bit of a human physiology enthusiast. While she doesn’t consider herself a scientist per se, she has a wonderful fascination with the inner workings of the human body that I can’t help but admire. Her curiosity is infectious!

I promptly came to the conclusion that the most romantic thing I could do with this information was creating an edible anatomically-correct human heart for her.

My first thought was to go the sugar skull route and just make a heart-shaped lump of sugar with food coloring on it, but that didn’t feel like much of a grand, romantic gesture. I mean, I might as well give her a bucket of wet sand...which she would also enjoy, now that I think about it.

Still, I wanted to give her the experience of eating a live human heart, blood and all, just with a more palatable taste.

At least, I would assume human hearts aren’t sweet, but I’ve never eaten one before. They seem like they’d be on the more savory side? Are there organs that have a naturally sweet taste? I digress.

This simple idea quickly overcomplicated itself, and I was soon creating faux sugar-based human tissue and using that to create an accurate-enough recreation of a heart. Then I filled it with unsweetened strawberry jam, which is delicious! :)

I couldn’t even use our kitchen for this (it would spoil the surprise). I invite you all to simply imagine me, alone in my lab, surrounded by half-used or empty bags of granulated sugar and various baking equipment alongside all of my very expensive and now very sugarcoated lab equipment. It was like I had my own science-themed cooking show! Or maybe just…cannibalism-themed.

For the record, I’ve never eaten any components of my test subjects, that would be unsanitary.

Have you ever had Fruit Gushers? Sampling a few of the smaller test-run hearts I made, I found the experience to be a bit similar to eating those, except the exterior was less candy-gummy and more flesh-gummy, if that makes sense. In terms of flavor, it was overwhelmingly sweet, more so than your average bottom-of-the-barrel grocery store strawberry jam. Considering this “heart” is mainly composed of literal sugar, I don’t know what I expected.

What I am proud about is the presentation! A human heart will always look a little strange, but I did try to keep the general layout (such as the general shapes, sizes, and locations of the chambers of the heart) as accurate as possible. Alongside a lot of strawberry jam “blood”. You know, for realism.

As one final little detail, I placed the cardiovascular confection into one of those fun “human organ for transplant” boxes! A fake one. Obviously.

Pride month arrived much sooner than expected, but my gift was ready nonetheless.

While I won’t bore you with an extensive overview of our day together (unless you want me to), I will say that my beloved Alice is still wonderful at giving gifts.

This year, she gave me…a rat plushie! A plushie that she made! A handmade rat! I named her Lexi and she fits in the palm of my hand and I will be carrying her everywhere at all times, forever.

I was so moved that I nearly forgot to give her my gift!

Maybe the “human organ” box wasn’t the best idea, as she thought I was literally gifting her a human organ. She was much more excited about the prospect of that than I anticipated. Although she pretended not to be disappointed when I told her that I wasn’t gifting her a real organ, she perked back up when she learned that it was actually food.

I overfilled the heart. The second she bit into it, strawberry jam went everywhere. Casualties include my lab coat, our couch, the rug, the walls…

Lexi is okay, though.

She assured me that she loved the gift, telling me that the taste and texture was “soooo indescribable and confusing, but in a good way”. She did end up eating the whole thing, and even noticed all the little details I put into it! Even if it did make a mess, it was at least good to know that my faithful recreation of the aortic valve did not go to waste.

We spent much of our evening cleaning the horrific strawberry jam explosion, laughing things off before getting some late-night pizza.

Next year, I think I’ll just give her a collection of human organs preserved in jars.

Stay Curious!

- Dr. Diamond