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.