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Friday, 13 April 2012

Eastertide

So it was Easter at the weekend!

We went to my uncles for Easter as usual and he always sets up a treasure hunt. This year we moved to a new level with a traditional hunt followed by a personalised code to find a password and a contact name. Mine was an alphabet, number code followed by a Fibonacci division number code. It took me a long time. With assistance. But I think it was fun? The kind that is fun in hindsight!

For me the rest of Easter involves church and chocolate. And since the miracles of Easter seem beyond our current knowledge of physics I propose a new chocolate related experiment with the aim to find the perfect time for which to leave a minstrel in a cup of hot chocolate. The perfect time being defined as allowing the chocolate to melt to an ideal amount as defined by me and not leading to a loss of flavour or break down of outer shell. I can tell that I'm going to enjoy this.

Although there are several challenges faced in this experiment.
  1. The subjective element of perfect melt levels - I decided that only my opinion matters
  2. Temperature control since the hot chocolate should stay at the same temperature for all the trials - I decided to immerse all the minstrels simultaneously and have a frenzied fish out, eat and record every 10 seconds
  3. A limit on the number of trials since I don't want to feel too sick - just 10 to begin and use skimmed milk.
  4. Mouth burns - half water, half milk
The hot chocolate consisted of a heap teaspoon of options hot chocolate powder, half boiling water and half skimmed milk at 5*C.

My results showed that until 70s the centre still remained firm. However at 70s it was soft through but the shell had began to discolour although it was still hard. By 90s the shell had completely discoloured and by 170s the shell was far too thin and had begun to split.

70-80s is the optimum time immersed in the hot chocolate mix described above. However it does require quite a lot of patience!

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