First week I worked at chocolate station which was very interesting. We would spend a good part of our day writing with small piping bags of a room temperature mixture of chocolate and cream called ganache.
We would also pipe out "Happy Birthday" along with a border design onto plates for the restaurant in case they found out one of the tables was celebrating a birthday. If they actually made a note of the birthday when the reservation was placed we could get a name and personalize the plate like I did in the second picture.
We also practiced interesting little designs known as arabesques. When making them for actual use we would use tempered chocolate that is firm at room temperature so we can pop them off the parchment paper and use them to top cakes and various other desserts. Because of their fragile nature they would break if I wasn't very careful. Many expletives were used.
We also made after dinner chocolates with various fillings we got to experiments with. It was almost like science class as we mixed different liquids into the main mixture to see if we could come up with some tasty results. One mixture I and another student tried was rose water and almond. It tasted good in the bowl but when it was in the chocolate it tasted way too much like a chocolate filled with perfume. I did make another mixture that was just a banana flavored filling but it was a big hit and many were "sampled" by the other students and I. Near the end of the week I decided to experiment a little bit and make more of the banana filling and add crushed butterfinger. They rocked and disappeared quickly. Below is a photo of the filling before I filled it over with more dark chocolate and put it into the reach in refrigerator to set overnight.
Nowadays its all done by machines but its cool to know how to do it myself in case I ever want to make handmade ones to give out for holidays or something.
Besides the production items we also had two projects to work on. First was a chocolate oven that beyond the dimensions of the oven we had full creative control of how the oven looked. Since most ovens made had a stove top I decided to go with a grill top. It meant I had to make a bunch of tiny little black strips. It was tedious but I think it turned out well.
I scored a 49 out of 50 on my oven. I decided not to put anything in the oven because I wanted to concentrate on the scene happening on top which, if you are having trouble making it out, is a big fish being grilled while a cat is keeping a close eye on it from above. The fish, cat, grill, and knobs are made out of modeling chocolate. Its exactly like play-doh and you can modify the color with chefs rubber which is a fat based food coloring as water based food coloring causes the chocolate to seize up. Making the cat was especially difficult because it would absorb the heat from my hands and become too soft to hold the shapes I formed it into so I ended up making the cat in three separate parts and then assembling them on the oven so I could let each piece cool off while I worked with the others. I must have formed the head 5 times but each time I was almost done it got so soft that just holding it made it start to flatten out.
Second was a small amenity showpiece where we had complete creative control as long as it fit on a cardboard base and was able to display a few individual chocolates.
I was actually having some trouble coming up with an idea for this piece. The day when we were supposed to start the project I ended up thinking about my niece Shayla and how she liked cookie monster so after a little discussion with chef Meyer and a little research in the computer lab I had my idea and got to work. After making some blue modeling chocolate it was apparent it would take way too much if i were to craft it out of solid chocolate so I ended up using a Styrofoam cup as the base for the head and two 4oz plastic portion cups for the hands. It worked surprisingly well since in the show his hands are about the size of his head since both his head and hands are occupied by human hands. I was planning to make the five fingers but after working with the modeling chocolate the fingers would have never held up under their own weight so he got mittens instead. I actually managed to finish the piece that day despite being given a day and a half to work on it. As I am usually over critical of myself I wish I had done a little better job in a few spots but Chef Meyer really liked it. He gave me a score of 50 out of 50 points and had me put it on display in the schools front entrance!
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