We started working with chocolate this week, and after the second day, we were given a project to do. We were to pour out half of a chocolate egg and use it to make some sort of chocolate design that would showcase some of the techniques we have learned along the way. It's weird how 16 people working in such close quarters with the same materials can end up with such different designs. Here are a few of the more photogenic ones. There are others that are just as interesting, but didn't come out very well. The boring little duo of chocolate ladybugs is my attempt. I got to temper both white and dark chocolate, learned how to pour a thin mold, handle the shape so there were as few fingerprints as possible, and glue up tiny shapes using heat (the side of a hot pot) and a parchment cone. The leaf is an imprint of a real leaf using decor chocolate, which is melted chocolate and karo syup. To give you an idea, it has the taste and consistency of a tootsie roll.
This one is my favorite...it's an avocado with a chick hatching out of an egg in the middle, and a chocolate feather left behind by the hen. She made the dome, then glued a flat chocolate base on the bottom. She rolled out yellow and green marzipan and stuck that to the flat surface, then glued a molded chocolate hemisphere on top, and finished with the little marzipan feet. It's quite difficult to glue chocolate and marzipan together, especially with the humidity we have here in the summer. The marzipan tends to shrink and slide off as it gets moist. The feather was amazing. She traced the outline of a real feather and cut it out on a flat sheet of chocolate. Before the chocolate had set fully, she took a dollmaking tool composed of thin wire bristles to literally feather the edges. Cool, huh?
The frame for this cameo was made by pressing a real frame into a bed of cocoa powder, then filling it with tempered chocolate. Once it set, she simply lifted the tablet out of the cocoa powder and was left with this textured finish. The silhouette is cut out of marzipan, and is the result of several different attempts to achieve the proper effect. She had intended to pipe details in with white chocolate, but ran out of time. I think it looks fantastic the way it is...although maybe it would've been more striking if the cameo had been made of white chocolate.
And finally, I had to include this picture even though it's kind of blurry. His spines are made of cut shards of chocolate glued to the egg body, and the head and feet are molded from marzipan. The movement created by all those jagged edges make this design really eyecatching from clear across the room, and once up close, he looks quite lifelike, don't you think?
8 comments:
I still like your ladybugs the best! The porcupine is a little clunky-looking. The chocolate feather was kind of cool, though.
Holy crap, that makes me hungry. You should get a camera with a macro function.
Man, those look too good to eat...
Dude, what's a macro function??
And Kea, it's great that it looks good to you, because believe me, after working with the stuff for 6 hours, the last thing you want to do it eat it!
Macro function: allows you to take pictures at close range. Is there a little "flower" icon on your camera?
Yes, there is. Unfortunately, it always wants to use to flash when I use the macro, which ends up in overexposed pictures. Without a flash, I take the chance that the picture will come out unfocused because the shutter speed is too slow. I hate my camera.
I don't know what kind of camera you have, but if it's a really nice one you could probably get a separate macro lens for it.
If you're using the macro lens, you probably should invest in a tripod so it won't be blurry.
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