Friday, December 07, 2007

Christmas Is Coming: Making Chocolates

Not the most flattering picture of my lovely daughter.
But it really captures her in action.

It actually reminds me of me.
Crazy, unkempt.

And though I never liked chocolate until I lived in Europe, chocolate has been in my blood since I was young. I used to make chocolates with my mom.

I actually won an adult chocolate sculpture contest when I was 12. So now it's my turn to share chocolate art with my daughter.

So we started off filling chocolate bear forms with a paintbrush. It didn't go very well. Trying to paint small forms was clearly inhibiting Chase. So we switched to sheets of tin foil. This worked really well. So well, in fact, that we did three large sheets.

Chase covered them in chocolate. Then we set them aside so that the chocolate could harden and later be pulled from the foil to stand alone.

The most beautiful part about the process was that Chase had no idea she was using chocolate. She didn't even try to taste it. I could tell, however, that she was curious about why the chocolate was changing from liquid to solid form.

And she was utterly put-out when the paint brush "froze" solid with cooled chocolate.