I’ll freely admit it: I absolutely fall for whatever seasonal coffee-based products that restaurants and coffee places deliver in the latter half of the year. While pumpkin spice will always be number one in my heart, there have absolutely been some strong contenders during the holiday season.

Case in point: Starbucks’ caramel brulée latte, also known as “carbrl lat”. It’s a latte, but with more sugar. They have other things, too, but I was immediately taken with this sweet little number. I’ve already had three this season, which is easily two too many, but in my defense… there’s no defense for my poor eating/drinking habits. I just love sugar.

And so yeah, this is… a latte with more sugar. I really don’t know what else to say about it, and I don’t have a story to pad out this post. Much as I love coffee and coffee-related goods, I really have no idea how to talk about them in a know-it-all kind of manner. Sure, I could make stuff up like I know what I’m talking about, but I really don’t dig the idea of outright lying to my readers. Even if those readers are just me four years from now.

That’s about all I have to say on this one. A venti has 59 grams of sugar. That’s more than a dang Slurpee of comparable size. For the sake of you not developing diabetes, I can’t wholly recommend you get this thing. At least get a smaller size. And cap it off at one a year. And ask for no whipped topping. Don’t be like me. I’m a terrible role model.

At least they spelled my name right that time.

It was only late last year, I think, when we finally got an IHOP here. But it’s all the way on the opposite side of the city. Unfortunate, because I have no desire to drive that far for pancakes. Fortunate, because I may have gone bankrupt on pancakes if it were any closer.

However! My family has taken to going there for special occasions, and most recently we went to have dinner to celebrate my brother’s birthday. Only the guest of honour wasn’t there, because he was in Mexico at the time. So really it was just an excuse for us to all go to IHOP. Which I am fine with, because did I mention I love IHOP? #notsponsored

At current, they have a weird cross-promotional thing on where they’ve themed a chunk of their menu after The Grinch, what with the new movie coming out and all. I’ve never been a Grinch fan, so I couldn’t care less about this promotion. Especially since it replaced the fall promotion where they brought back the Cinn-A-Stack pancakes for a limited time. IHOP’s Cinn-A-Stack pancakes are like my most favourite meal of all time, so now I like the Grinch even less.

Instead, I ordered the monstrosity you see below: The “Who-Roast Beast Omelette”. I don’t know why they needed to add the “Who-” on there. I think everyone would have got it with just the “Roast Beast” part. I don’t like the name. It seems weird to me. It was impossibly embarrassing to say while making my order. Stupid Grinch.

But this omelette, despite its silly name, is fantastic! It’s full of hashbrowns, roast beef, cheese, onions, and jalapenos, topped with BBQ sauce and serrano peppers. It’s basically my dream omelette. The most delicious thing in the world (that isn’t cinnamon-themed). If I had any motivation to cook something so elaborate for myself, you could be that I’d be gorging on something like this almost weekly. But man, it’s just way too complicated. Who has time for that?

The only thing that I didn’t like about this omelette is that the menu warns you that it’s SPICY, but it is decidedly not SPICY. It’s barely even spicy. Maybe they under-jalapenoed mine, I don’t know. But it was fairly tame on the spiciness scale. On the other hand, it’s stuffed with hashbrowns, and I am way into stuffing pretty much anything with hashbrowns. You really can’t go wrong with hashbrowns. I mean, you can. I have. But that’s because I’m a terrible cook and burned the crap out of them. This is a weird tangent.

And that’s about all I have to say about that. It’s late. There aren’t enough hours in the day. I’m suddenly remembering why I barely write blog posts anymore. 24 days in a row may have been a terrible idea.

Mondays here on the 24 Days of Gluttony are going to be all about chocolate bars. Or, chocolate-based treats, at any rate. Something that it’s mainly chocolate, probably with some other factor on the inside of the chocolate. I’m also cheating with my “holiday-themed” rule already because as it turns out, there are so many fewer Xmas-themed foods out than there used to be. At least, there are fewer worth writing about.

So today we take a look at a fun Swedish chocolate bar that, as far as I know, one can only buy from IKEA, at least if you’re in my neck of the woods. I also heard rumours that there are orange-flavoured Daims, but I did not care to follow up with that, because I strongly believe that chocolate and orange are a terrible pairing.

So Daim. It’s basically Skor. You probably could not tell the difference if you were presented with one of each bar without the wrapper. It’s chocolate covering a hard toffee centre. It’s delicious, but the toffee splinters will likely cause you a little bit of inner mouth trauma.

I guess Daim bars also come in like a regular candy bar size as well, but I only know their fun-size equivalent. Maybe IKEA sells the big version? I don’t know. I never thought to look, and also I’ve never actually purchased Daim on my own. I’ve only ever had them when my parents bring home one of the bags of fun-size bars.

Should you buy Daim? Sure! I mean, if you’re at IKEA, or you live closer to one than I do. It’s a half-hour drive. I just can’t be bothered. Also, I suppose if you like in Sweden you’re probably pretty familiar with these things already. And if you do happen to live in Sweden, would you mind leaving a comment about how you even wound up reading this, please? Like, I can’t even imagine what would have driven you here. But I’m very interested!

On day number two, and in fact every Sunday while this feature is running, we’re going to look at a holiday-themed tea. Because -and I don’t know ho in-depth I’ve blogged about this before- I am a big fan of tea. Particularly in the winter; it’s so nice to come in from the cold after a long day at work and snuggle up on the couch with a big, piping-hot cup o’ tea.

This particular entry is a specialty mix from David’s Tea: Santa’s Secret. There’s some deep lore on the tin about how this tea is what gets Santa to ever good little child’s house throughout the night of Christmas Eve, but that’s hardly what I’m here for. That’s more of a MatPat thing. Unless, do you think I could get away with doing a HolidayTheory show on YouTube?

Anyway, this is a black tea, made special by the addition of peppermint, vanilla, and -get this- itty-bitty candy canes. Now that I write it out, I probably shouldn’t be lining up all the “candy cane flavoured” items right out of the gate. Excuse me for a moment while I go and re-shuffle my update schedule…

Okay, so, tiny candy canes. Yup. If you squint real hard at that picture above you can see exactly one of these little guys. What’s really impressive is that they are actually miniaturized candy canes, and not just shavings of red-and-white sugar. David’s Tea is out there making marshmallow cereals the world over look bad.

As for the flavour? It’s magnificent! I’m not typically a black tea guy- I prefer green or fruity teas, normally. But peppermint, like always, wins the day here. It’s so nice and smooth, and those candy canes give it just the right amount of sweetness. I’m a huge fan, but it actually isn’t my favourite tea that we’ll see throughout this feature. That won’t be showing up for a couple weeks.

My recommendation is obviously hearty, and I’d say you should definitely give it a go. I actually got the pictured tin as an Xmas gift last year, and while I didn’t actually see it on a trip to David’s Tea that I made a couple days ago (I wasn’t looking for it), it is available again in 2018 on their website. So you can definitely go get you some!

A long time ago, when I had more ambition to create better blog content, I devised a feature called “The 24 Days of Materialism” as a sort of Advent calendar stand-in. It was simply a collection of 24 things -one write-up posted each day from Dec 1st to 24th- that I found interesting, and would recommend as possible gift ideas. It was not the dumbest thing I’ve ever come up with.

But that feature was shut down promptly when I moved out of my parents’ house and no longer had seemingly infinite disposable income. Also it was a heck of a lot of work and I really just haven’t been that interested in blogging over the last few holiday seasons.

I’m writing this post because I felt a longing for this silly, forgotten feature, and wanted to find a way to bring it back without breaking the bank. I don’t buy too much random stuff these days, clothes are boring, and I wanted to exclude video games completely, so what was left?

Food.

Of course! I’m always buying food! And there are so many options! It’s the perfect subject! Exclamation points! And even better if I pick from mostly holiday-themed food, I figure. So we’ll see what kind of things I can find on my weekly grocery trips.

That said, we’re going to start on a bit of a cop-out.

Candy Cane Viva Puffs!

Yeah, I’ve written about these at length already. You should go read that article. It’s pretty okay! Remember when I used to try to be funny and creative? Yeah, I miss those days. Although after a re-read, I’ve certainly picked out a few off-colour jokes that I’d never write today and should probably go back and remove.

Anyway, Candy Cane Viva Puffs are super. They’ve become a mainstay of the season for me, and no December is complete without a weekend where I down an entire box of these fluffy treats. It’s not a difficult task either, because there are only fifteen in a box and they have exactly zero substance to them. You could probably eat a whole box in a single sitting and not notice. At least until an hour later and you go into a sugar coma.

Review score: Buy them! (For me!)