Drawing with chocolate

October 12th, 2009 by justJENN

Drawing with chocolate is a really simple way to decorate. If you are afraid of fondant, try this – you can still get really creative and it’s kind of a neat way to make characters some to life…not to mention it’s delicious.

It was my friend Paul’s birthday, and I knew I was going to make cupcakes but I wanted to do something different. Since he draws a comic called Cool Jerk, I thought it’d be neat surprise to take one of his characters and draw it in chocolate. I hadn’t done anything like that before, so I just figured it out on the fly. This is how I did it:

I printed out a picture of the character: Armpit, as well as a few others you might recognize. Then reversed the images in photoshop – why? Because I knew that I was going to flip the chocolate when it was done and I wanted it to read correctly. Trust me, this is going to work out…

I taped a piece of parchment on top, then I simply melted some chocolate chips, put it in a piping bag and went to work. If you don’t have a piping bag, use a ziploc, but just make sure you don’t cut the corner off too big, you want a FINE LINE, so the smaller the end, the better the control.

Here’s where I realized I had made a mistake. Armpit’s lineweights were a bit too delicate to work with the melty chocolate. However, the other were a lot easier. I had done Snoopy before in fondant, so the shape was familiar anyway. And Lucy was really easy since half of it was black anyway – note for next time, do a character with a lot of shading.

I let the chocolate dry, then melted some white chocolate and put that in a piping bag. I piped a thick layer over the chocolate – be careful, if the chocolate lines aren’t totally dry, they will smear. Also be wary of air pockets, they will show up when you turn it over.

Put the chocolate in the freezer for a few minutes, when solid, just slide them off the parchment, turn them over and you should see your work in chocolate form!

There are so many possibilities with this, just remember, try and pick something familiar, that way if you screw up, people will still recognize the character, and try and pick something with thicker line weights. It’ll make your life easier, trust me.

The Baby’s birthday is next month and it is to be a full blown Batman party. I see the future and it looks like Batman piped in chocolate on cupcakes. But how does Batman feel about chocolate anyway? Hm…Maybe not.