Post Holiday High Caloric Offerings

The pecan pie and fruitcake reminded me of the date nut bread I use to live off of on trail. 1 loaf per 2 days on trail. I made it heavy on nuts , pecans and walnuts in equal parts, and honey to make it a little less sweet. Lara bars are similar in composition. The date nut bread might be a buck per slice, but equals 2 bars, which are 2 bucks each. I tend to bomb when I eat too much sugar on the trail.
Thousands of years from now, archeologists will be able to discern where the ritual of Christmas was observed by the intact remains of fruitcakes left behind in a petrified state, much as they were when coeval with the practice. They were often used in the ritual of "re-gifting".

I actually started down this trail with Wycanislatrans from old forums when he was still in Wyoming. He would haul in homemade pilot bread and cakes from his church life. In the 60's, my outdoor writer father would always produce some bars like your date nut bread via midwestern white gys that sold it as "pemmican" It was not pemmican but the survivalist crowd of the time, pre-preppers, bought it up.

Oh it was. His children were lab rats for everything shooting, navigation, hiking, survival, and water sourcing in the deserts and mountains around Tucson, then Prescott AZ. Our mother was very much a fan of the Whole Earth movement and swiped my first copies of Mother Earth News.

Chip Rawlins, co-author of The Complete Hiker IV, with Colin Fletcher did a brief blurb on bars, just as Clif bars were first really coming on. He would rant about how some of the popular ones had a significant "gag factor". Fletcher had gone off into his own rabbit hole over Spirulina (sp) in III but recanted in IV.

I no longer have chocolate in the house, or it doesn't last long enough to be BP treats.

I take ziplocks of milk chocolate chips. If you peeled all the kisses I guess it would be like a bag of giant chips.

I have had them melt in the bag but generally in the overnight temps they solidify back up into an oddly shaped chunk of chocolate. A little harder to portion out and eat but still a fine treat. Better than a block with a bunch of wrappers mixed in.

I think these "commercial" chocolates are made to have a slightly higher melting point than fine chocolates (maybe some emulsifiers too that help with the melt/solidify). A long time ago when visiting Germany we went to the Lindt factory. Part of the tour was the physical properties of chocolate. I think they aim for a melt point of 86F so that the temp of your mouth melts them and sets off the favor fully. If you hold one one them in your fingers for a minute they start to melt a little unlike "commercial"

Sorry to disagree with relatively new guy but I don't think there is such a thing as bad chocolate. Milk chocolate is the gateway chocolate for many people.

This is one of the mugs in our house: