Chocolate, Thou Art My Torment

Yeah, there it is. My very first start-to-finish chocolate showpiece. Whatever.

Actually, I am pleased with a few things about it, most particularly that I finished the damn thing and got it critiqued by Chef before it tumbled into pieces (for the record, it’s currently still standing).

While the actual composition was up to us, our showpiece had to have several required elements that weren’t about visual brilliance as much "here, try this, and this, and see how to do this," similar to our sugar showpieces.

From the bottom up, it’s an oval 1/4" dark chocolate base with six hidden little dark chocolate disc feet to make moving it around easier, followed by a 1/8" marbled white chocolate plaque (yes, marbled by yours truly). Then it’s thinner-than-thin dark chocolate "ribbons," a rose made of two-tone modeling chocolate, a hollow dark chocolate sphere dusted with metallic purple and silver coloring and three 1/8" dark chocolate scrolls.

I will say it’s pretty cool that I started with two bowls of chocolate chunks, one white and one dark, and ended up with all this, but it was a long, hard road.

Der Erlkonig has likened chocolate to a wild stallion ("it will do what it wants with you") but I’ve found it to be more like my sophomore year roommate in college. Really, really needy and whiny and never happy. Waaaah, I’m too cold! Waaaah, I’m too hot! Waaaaah! Quit stirring me! Waaah! What are you doing just standing there when I want to be stirred!

Give me flesh-searing sugar anyday. Sugar I understand. It’s like the hordes of Genhis Khan, relentless, merciless, blood-thirsty (don’t believe me? Try dripping some sugar at hard crack stage on your hand and watch as it eats through your flesh all the way to the bone).

Chocolate is just a big baby.

Anyway, I will say I like working with modeling chocolate, which we made from scratch on our own. It’s a lot like the Plasticine I remember loving as a kid in terms of texture and malleability, though it does dry out faster.

I also had the least trouble doing my chocolate sphere out of everyone in my class. Know why? Because I made 5,000 of them for the New Year’s Eve party at the hotel in Vegas. Everyone else was letting their chocolate sit too long, or pouring it in too hot or not scraping it right or forgetting to flip it over and having to redo it, but I got mine out of the way in one shot, and the halves were nice and thin (which of course you don’t see once you glue it together).

The base and plaque were easy. The ribbons were irksome, partly because the purple coloring powder I dusted on the acetate never showed, and also because I was rushing to finish them and put slightly too-cold chocolate on too thinly, which caused cracking and other small disasters. That said, I think the ribbon "ends" as opposed to the ribbon loops came out well. Chef liked them.

Then again, she didn’t have to make them.

The scrolls. Sweet baby Jesus, the scrolls. We were only required to have two, one big, one short, on the showpiece, but I made one extra, just in case. They’re only 1/8" thick, and tricky tricky tricky to cut, get off the acetate and then assemble. A lot of people broke all their scrolls and had to redo them. I got to the point of gluing mine on Friday only to find my chocolate was just a teensy bit too hot and refused to set. Pressed for time, instead of trying to wrangle with it I just set it aside (our projects don’t have to be finished until next week, though finishing in the two-day window you’re given to work on just that is the way to go, since every other day we move on to a new medium, with a new project).

Monday I finished it, tempering a little chocolate during lunchtime and, for the first time, not feeling like I wanted to scream while doing it. The chocolate tempered nicely, and quick, and I stuck on the short scroll. Yay! I picked up the tall scroll. CRACK! Yes, it split down the middle in the lower third for no reason whatsoever. Dammit. I mended it using a trick I’d seen some of the guys in Vegas do, spreading a thin layer of chocolate band-aid over the wound with my paring knife. It set, but the mend was obvious. Hence the "extra" short scroll, glued tactfully in front of it. When Legolas accused me of being an overachiever with three scrolls, I explained what happened. He looked at the showpiece from every angle, for a long time, before pronouncing "I don’t see where it broke."

Exactly.

Here are a couple more shots from different angles. Not my finest work, but at least it’s in one piece, with decent shine and all the required components: