Chocolate Showpieces Day 3

In my day to day at The Chocolate Fetish I don’t get many chances to create chocolate showpieces.  Flowers however are in high demand, so I am always grateful for a new technique.  Today Chef Leroux taught us a relatively quick method that should be easily adaptable to making lots of different kinds of flowers.  We began by making petals, lots and lots of petals.  We were instructed to make petals in sets of various lengths and curved angles so when constructing the flower they would layer well together.  Then we tediously attached them to a center sphere taking care because the delicate petals easily melted in our hands.  The final step was to airbrush the flowers with colored Cocoa butter.  This proved to be another tedious step as just the pressure from the airgun threatened to blow petals off the delicate flowers.

The flowers were our last element to build so after the airbrush we moved on to putting it all together.  I tend to want to rush to this step and not spend the time it really takes to get each of the elements absolutely perfect.  It becomes more and more important to be presice with each element because one little wobble between pieces will cause a big problem when you add multiple pieces together and make something three feet tall.  Furthermore its helpful to make multiple extra pieces because every once in awhile a piece you thought was connected well goes crashing to the floor and it sure is nice to have an extra ready to go.   Another important lesson learned… from now on my chocolate showpiece mantra will be “take the time to get it right now and make extra or you will regret it later.”