Chocolate Art

Chocolate art!! Yep, this week we are combining two of my favorite things chocolate and art. Before I explain the process to this I have to admit working with chocolate is not easy. I used chocolate chips if you recreate this you may want to use candy melts that you can find at the craft store. Candy melts are a lot less temperamental than chocolate and you will have a better finished product than I did.

I was trolling through Pinterest and I found this

I thought how much fun it would be to recreate this cake in honor of my family on valentines day. You could also use this same method to recreate some pictures that your children have drawn and use it on a special cake for them. I teach cake decorating for Wilton and we use this method with royal icing to create 3d embellishments for cakes.  Remember when you do a project like this the outcome is going to look very simple and basic. I know you see beautiful art pieces on television, but those people are highly trained artists. The art we recreate at home is more fun art than fine art.

Choosing the chocolate. Like I said earlier candy melts are so much easier than what I did. I had two bags of chocolate chips that were bought by mistake so I thought I would put them to good use with this project.

You can melt chocolate on the stove top using a double boiler or you can put it in the microwave. If you use the microwave method you have to start with about 30 seconds, stir it and then continue in 10-15 second intervals. You also want to melt in small batches and in paper bowls. The chocolate will harden quickly and make it impossible to pipe out and you want to use paper because you don't want to spend the rest of the afternoon washing chocolate out of the bowl.

When you melt it on the stove or the microwave watch the melting process VERY carefully it can go from beautiful chocolate to this in a heart beat.

Once chocolate burns it is trash. There is no saving it. I burnt this batch so I can show you what it looks like. (yeah ok I am lying)

Once you have chocolate that looks like this

You are ready to go. I poured my chocolate into a plastic pastry bag and cut off the tip. You could use a ziplock bag if you don't have a pastry bag.

If you were using your child's drawing as a template you can cover the drawing with parchment paper and just trace over the image and let it dry. I did not have any parchment paper so I used a plastic treat bag and it worked perfectly.

I played with a few buildings, but I decided to freehand the members of my family and our house.

When you are working with chocolate think bug clunky lines (which is why children art is a perfect template) You can't go into detail and all the lines have to connect or they will break. I was doing this for fun and for a blog post, but if you are doing this for any occasion you want to do all your embellishments twice if you don't I promise you there will be breakage. 

After the cake is done and iced and the images were piped I put them both into the refrigerator to chill out. The cake is easier and cleaner to work with chilled and the chocolate has to have an hour or two to set.

The finished cake had the heads ( one of the bodies broke so they decided to eat the bodies leaving only the heads to decorate with) of all my family on it as well as my cat and the outline of our house.

Everyone had a blast getting a piece that had their head attached.

This is a fun way to bring kids into the kitchen and to create a one of a kind cake that will be special for the whole family. Don't worry about how the finished product looks, even if everything breaks and you sprinkle the chocolate over the top it was still fun had by the whole family and it is still yummy cake so it is a win win :)

Get your kids in the kitchen have fun and make messes but most importantly make memories.





Chocolare art by Cindy Schriver is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Hello, my name is Cindy I am a single Mom with three amazing daughters. We have homeschooled since preschool. All of my kids have various degrees of sensory and learning differences so we use crafting to help take what they learn in books and make them tangible. This is going to be a blog to share with you some of the unique ways we have used crafting to enhance not only our education but to enhance who we are as people. I hope you will enjoy this blog and try some of the things that we highlight. Crafting is great because there is no right or wrong way to do something. I went to a painting class once and they kept telling us our goal was to make fun art not fine art. That is what we try and remember. Even if the project doesn't come out just right, you still have made memories and those are priceless. 

Before I go on any farther let me introduce you to the three reasons I do all that I do.
These are my three girls they are teenagers and almost ready to fly the nest but they will fly the nest with a love for getting crafty. 

This week I told my girls about a project for my school ( I am attending college)that would involve blind people. My girls have always had a heart for people in special situations in life. We have taken ASL for many years as a family and recently they have become curious about the blind. When they found out about my project they had the idea to make a card for the blind participants using braille. We had long discussions on how in the world we could create a card in braille without a braille writer.

They came up with the idea of using puffy paint glue to make the raised dots on a page to form braille letters.

We looked up on the internet how to create Braille letters. Got some paint glue and card stock. Braille letters are not as difficult to create as they first seem. They are created on a grid of six squares with the dots appearing in certain squares to make the letter.

Our finished product. After folding the 12x12 card stock into quarters to form the card. I went simple with the message. Even if the words aren't difficult to make you still don't want to write a novel in Braille, by hand. The note says (I hope) "Thank You" in green and "UNF" in the blue and silver (school colors)

Crafting does not have to be an elaborate project. Even monumental mess ups can become treasured family memories that get laughed over for years. I hope this blog inspires you to let crafts help you make connections with your loved ones and with total strangers ( like the recipients of the card above).

Happy Crafting!!!!