Fantasy chocolate creations

Fantasies are intensely private affairs unless one is truly uninhibited. But for the fearless chocophile, crafting with chocolate is an irresistible lure. There comes a day when chocophiles go public and their fantasies burst forth, assisted by molds and a few techniques, to knock the socks off their friends and family.

You’ve seen molded chocolate, usually in the form of bunnies, Santas or pumpkins depending on the season, but has it ever occurred to you that you could possibly make your own? Hang on, because it is not only possible, it is as much fun as making mud pies and almost as hard. Granted, most home candy crafting uses ‘compound’ or coating ‘chocolate’, which comes in many quality levels. The one most often used by home candy crafters is Merckens, a reasonably good-tasting compound. The advantage of using a compound is it doesn’t need to be tempered, and chocolate does. If you don’t know about tempering chocolate, Chocolatier magazine is the place to start learning about chocolate-making and has all the ads for chocolate equipment a foodie can dream of. Tempering chocolate is a theoretically simple but dicey process of heating and cooling the chocolate at just the right temperatures so it handles well. If you’re a beginner, you don’t want to go there. Anyway, the Merckens is perfectly decent-tasting. What you’re going for is visual effect, not actual decadence. Personally, I wouldn’t make a piece of painted candy out of very fine chocolate. That would be gilding the lily overmuch.

You will need some very simple equipment: a ‘palette’ (a tiny muffin tin), a heating pad or old-fashioned electric ‘hostess tray’ (try yard sales or a thrift store), either brushes that you use for nothing else (!), or coffee stir-sticks or what-have-you for the actual ‘painting’. The most important things you need are the molds. There are a few places on the net where you can buy molds but in my area they are impossible to find. Happily, I have a box of molds I’ve had for many years and if the urge strikes me I can always get Merckens on the net. The only melting candy sold in my area is Wilton’s candy melts and they just do not meet my quality standards.

Once your candy is melted and ready to use, you just paint the inside of your mold any way you like. Actually, it’s more of a controlled blobbing than painting. The detail is already in the mold, all you really have to do is highlight it. One really beautiful effect is light-on-dark, or the reverse. My favorite valentine mold is very effective done that way. You can do fully painted figurines and really knock the recipients’ socks off! I have a striding bunny with a large basket on his back and when I paint him, I paint the plaid of his jacket! Honestly, it’s so much fun and so easy when you get the hang of it!

When they were little, my kids used to paint their own Easter Bunnies. They came out with some amazing color combinations but the molds ensured they were successful. If four-year-olds can do it, so can you!

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