Edible Art

I had so much fun making the marzipan characters we had to make for our marzipan modeling assignment. These character that I made were based off of those in the book Marzipan Animals by Fredy Eggenschwiler, which I like because it has some of the more modern designs and I would love to own, but is impossible to find in the US! There is so much potential for these characters, which could be sold individually, wrapped in plastic bags--they do taste really good, but I love marzipan! Even more likely, they would make wonderful decorations on a themed cake.


The above is an alligator and the following are photos of each character.

Walrus

Duck

Ram (you don't see rams too often! A strange selection, but I thought it was cute!)

Parrot

Whale

Frog with fly in it's mouth

Chocolate Enameling. This is done with coating chocolate piped in a parchment piping bag. An image is placed beneath a clear plastic sheet and the image is traced with dark coating chocolate and then the spaces are flooded with colored white coating chocolate--a lot like coloring in coloring books!

The ladies who wrote the book The Whimsical Bakehouse have mastered this technique. I have been inspired by the book for years and found it to be a good resource for ideas.

Chocolate box and chocolate cutouts. I was very happy with the results of my box, but not terribly fond of the results of the cutouts. This took two days to complete and was way more complicated than it looks!

The bottom and lid (which is removable) are dark chocolate and the sides of the box are dark chocolate with colored cocoa butter colors. The cutouts on top are a mixture of dark, milk and white chocolate. I had a lot of trouble with tempering all of these batches of chocolate, which is one reason it was so difficult. Also, cutting such small pieces from the chocolate and making them look crisp and clean was quite a challenge. I think this would have looked better had I had the time to outline the flowers and leaves in more detail like the worm and bee.

White chocolate box with truffles. This was an exercise in making bows from chocolate. I was very happy with the results of this project and it would make a beautiful gift. The truffles inside were made several weeks prior during our candy making classes.

This is a collage of photos of my classmates chocolate cutout-box projects. I especially loved the castle project!

So, another week has come to an end and two more weeks remain in my culinary school career. The final two weeks will be focused on sugar work. It will be a welcome change after the past 4 weeks of working with and being covered in chocolate!