Observations of bars of chocolate

90% Lindt Dark Chocolate bar

From the package:

Ingredients: Chocolate, cocoa butter, cocoa powder processed with alkali, sugar, bourbon vanilla beans. May contain traces of peanuts/soybean/tree nuts/milk.

Dark Chocolate contains: Cocoa solids, 90% Min.

Keep cool (60-68 degrees Fahrenheit) and dry.

---

Bar is about 2 1/2 inches wide, 5 inches long, and a 1/4 inch thick.

Bar is wrapped in foil (aluminum? tin?) and enclosed by a thin cardboard box.

---

Bars sat in car as temperatures outside rose to 105 degrees Fahrenheit, or more.

---

Temperatures dropped to probably below 68 degrees Fahrenheit in the early morning.

---

Bars thus melted and resolidified (possibly several times over the course of a week or more). When I opened them, they were in varying degrees of solidity, ranging from liquid with no traces of solid to resolidified and hard all over.

---

Observations:

Volume was kept (nearly?) constant over the melting and resolidifying episodes.
Bars mostly lay flat during the period of temperature increases and decreases.

Temperature increases (evenly distributed across the bar?)

Melting (phase change)

  No separation was observed in the liquid chocolate
  The liquid chocolate was uniform black throughout

Temperature decreases (evenly across the volume of the bar?)

Resolidification
  Strata observed
  Marbling observed
  Crust of white less than a millimeter thick
  The face of the crust showed dendritic patterns:
    broad bands and swirls, oval depressions

---

One bar, when opened, looked like monzogranite on the sides, with rectangular crystals of white in the surrounding dark chocolate; like quartz in reddish-brown, or black, rock.

Also in the same bar at one end there was a depression and many small chocolate spheres, a uniform brown in color. It reminded me of the "pearls" I found at Kofa.

---

Another bar again showed the white crystals in the dark chocolate substrate, and again a depression on one end.

---

Another bar: again a depression in one corner of the rectangle, with a thin layer of chocolate then a wall, a plateau, of thicker chocolate.

The thin layer, the depression on the end, reminds me of the Sonoran desert. The thicker layer is like the Mogollon rim and the Colorado Plateau.

But there was no uplift in the enclosed volume of the bar?

The lower portion had several (10? 15) bubbles of chocolate, like domes. Some of the bubbles had burst, apparently, leaving a crater with a mound in the center. On the "roof" of the enclosing tin foil at these points were white "crystals". Also, when scraped up, the bottom of the mounds in the centers of the craters appeared to be white as well.

---

Conclusion: the chocolate formed a lower-density liquid at one end (perhaps the bars were slightly tilted?). Bubbles formed and popped, leaving craters.

Some of the smaller craters where white-ringed, without any observable center mound. The white rings on these "craters" were thicker than the black rings on the other, larger, "craters".

---

Another conclusion: the chocolate is separating upon resolidification. Can we use this action to purify minerals, or to make an engine somehow?

---

I could replicate my chocolate experiments, control temperature and measure pressure or calculate it, quantify everything and come up with some nice mathematical relation that obeyed Thermodynamics, probably. I could post it in the Journal of Epicycular Studies, and Blarney would be like "Yeah!!! You did it! You did something!!"

But what if I want to generate other hypotheses, like that the chocolate melted and resolidified in the same area as the phenomena I'm interested in, so there could be some influence beyond mere temperature, pressure, volume?

I wanna be Aristarhus of Samos, not some epicycle apologist.