PFB Celebrates Chocolate Time Machine

Both as a pretentious food blogger and as a civilian, I eat a lot of chocolate.  My favorite is Ritter Sport Alpine Milk Chocolate, a bar once brutally lambasted by an overly-candid Belgian friend, who claimed it was merde compared to real chocolate, the kind without lecithin, the poor, stigmatized chocolate filler.  Je m'en fous. I think Ritter Sport is, above anything, the right height. If memory serves, the vertical extent of a Ritter Sport is about one inch, which is the optimal size for hearing my favourite chocolate sound when I break off a square with my teeth.  (With thinner chocolate you definitely hear a snap; I'm still searching for the word to describe the sound from a one-inch bar.  I'm leaning toward thud.)

The Alpine Milk is the plain milk chocolate Ritter in the light blue package.  A recent taste test proved it is remarkably different, and much better liked by moi, than the basic Ritter Sport Milk Chocolate in the royal blue package, which boasts no affiliation with the Alps.  Both are 30% cocoa, yet the light blue tastes very mild and creamy, while the royal blue looks slightly darker and is more spicy. Only once all available Alpine Milk has been polished off will its lamentably non-mountainous competitor become subject to predation by pretentious food bloggers.

I also like Ritter Sport because it is cleverly marketed with the word 'sport' in the title, which continues to convince me that I am working out by eating it.  Nonetheless, I am often plagued by guilt after I have eaten an entire bar of Ritter Sport, which contains 533 calories (though I was delighted to read in a Jeffrey Steingarten essay that cocoa butter isn't entirely absorbed by the body, likely reducing any chocolate bar's 400 calories to 300- a rumor worth verifying.) 

I am often heard to say after enjoying a whole Ritter Sport (or a half-tub of Breyer's Cookies n' Cream ice cream, such as last night's, or three glasses of homogenized milk with Nesquik chocolate syrup, as was in fashion Monday and Tuesday of this week) that I wish I had a Chocolate Time Machine.  By this, I mean not a time machine made of delicious cocoa, but one that would bring me back to the moment just prior to my decision to eat a quarter or more of my daily calories in the form of chocolate.

Concerned readers relax, as at last I have found it! The elusive Chocolate Time Machine does in fact exist! Moreover, it is so incredibly simple to use, it requires no more intellectual prowess than, say, stepping one foot in front of the other!  It is also quick: ten minutes in the machine allows one to travel back approximately 100 calorie-units of time.  At least, this is the estimation legitimate to apply to an average 120-pound human; heavier, more muscled humans would require an even shorter session in the Chocolate Time Machine to travel back 100 calories!  Of course, for advanced users, there are many ways to enhance its efficiency and effectiveness at chocolate time travel; I'm happy to explain these to any of you who are interested, should you come offering something cocoaey in return for my sweet, melty advice.

In the course of my tireless search for Chocolate Time Machine, I tested several models, many of which worked well enough; in fact, you can read up on the efficiencies of various Chocolate Time Machines on the internet:
http://www.primusweb.com/fitnesspartner/calculat.htm.  While I still play around with several chocolate time traveling techniques just to hone my skills, only the invention pictured below will you see pretentiously revered here.  Behold the Alpine Milk of the Chocolate Time Machines, the Stairmaster, the one true Cocoa Delorean!