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Wedding Favors - Bronze dusted Chocolate Bells from a food-grade silicone mold
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Follow along in these steps to learn how I created the 80 bells that I used as wedding favors in my wedding. It's a pretty interesting process and it can be tailored to any 3-D object that you would like to cast in chocolate pieces. The bronze effect was accomplished using something called "pearl dust" from Michael's craft stores. | ||||||
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Food-grade Silicone sources: In order to create a chocolate object from a mold you need to get some "Food-grade" silicone for creating the mold out of whatever object you want. I tried the following three different sources for food-grade silicone (ranked with the best one first):
I found Smooth-on silicone to be the best for chocolate molding purposes. Actually the CopyFlex was just as good but the Smooth-On silicone was a little cheaper. I highly suggest staying away from the Hobby Silicone. After mixing it and letting it set I removed it from the mold and it smelled very much like chemicals...in a bad way. Any chocolates molded with the Hobby Silicone resulted in the same chemical smell. This chemical smell stayed with it for weeks. I eventually set it outside and when the smell never went away I finally just threw the mold in the garbage.
Creating the object to be molded
For my purposes I searched around until I found a porcelain bell that looked appropriate for my task. Porcelain objects are great for creating chocolate molds out of because the extremely smooth outside gives the chocolate a very clean, crisp exterior surface. This makes it look The bell I chose had two doves in relief on the surface that added some more dimension to it. After I figured out what I wanted to use for the main object I looked around for some stickers that had some depth to them. I found some plastic ones that worked perfectly because they were very smooth and they were thick enough to add some depth to the surface of the bell. The gold letters you see read "15th anniversary" but these have no depth so they do not show up in the final product. On the top of the bell there is a heart, but this had the number 15 inside of it, so I filled it with a food-grade clay called "Safe-D-Clay". Once filled in with clay I pressed a letter into the clay on each side so it looked like a monogram. The bride's monogram is on one side and the groom's on the other. Find the clay I used here: Safe-D-Clay: http://www.culinart.net/silicone.html I also filled the inside of the bell with Safe-D-Clay as a means of weighing it down once I poured the silicone over the top of it. The clay filled up the bell and the clay at the bottom stuck to the mold enclosure to make sure it didn't slide around in the silicone once it was poured.
Pouring the mold Once your mold object is finished you place it on the bottom of your mold container. This container has to be air-tight so that no molding compound flows out of it. A cheap tupperware of very light
material is the easiest to use. Mix up the desired amount of silicone with the two parts and pour it into the mold container around the object being molded. Pour it out very slowly so that you don't get any bubbles. If you really want to make sure you have a good result you will use a vacuum chamber to get all the bubbles out of the silicone after pouring it. The silicone mold, while still in a liquid state, is placed into the vacuum chamber. The vacuum is turned on which decreases the air pressure inside the chamber. This causes the air bubbles within the silicone to naturally flow to the top of the mold where it escapes. This way you make sure none of the bubbles are trapped against the surface of the original causing a mis-shaped final product. My own vacuum chamber is home-made using an aluminum housing and a Sergeant-Welch lab vacuum to evacuate the air from the chamber. It has a vacuum meter which reads inches of Mercury (Hg). If you want to make your own vacuum chamber, just create an air-tight container (maybe out of a strong tupperware) with an outlet somewhere to stick a vacuum hose. You can probably get away with using a household vacuum, but it might burn out the motor - not sure on that. It's helpful also to have some sort of plexiglass viewing porthole in order to see when all the bubbles get out of the mold. With the Smooth-On silicone you have to wait 24 hours for it to cure. After this point the mold has hardened and you can take it out of the container that you poured it into. To get the object out of the mold just find an inconspicuous place to slice open the mold. Try to keep the slice pretty straight so it's less noticeable. If you wanted to be more precise about the procedure you could create two seperate parts to the mold, but this would couble the time to create a finished mold. For the Smooth-On silicone you are supposed to bake the silicone in the oven at about 200 degrees for 4 hours before using it. I think this helps with outgassing and finishes the curing process. Wash out the mold with soapy water and let it dry thoroughly before using. | ||||||
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If you want to cast chocolate you can either use real chocolate or something called "compound chocolate" or "coating compound" or "chocolate coatings" which is the same as real chocolate except
that it doesn't have any cocoa butter in it. If you get the right kind it tastes just as good as the best chocolate out there! Compound chocolate makes it easier for creating castings because you don't have to worry so much about tempering and the other strict rules about using real chocolate. There are many different kinds of compound chocolate. Here is a quick list of choices for Compound Chocolates: Bada Bing Bada Boom: (GREAT STUFF!) Merckens: Renaissance III (sugar-free): Michael's craft stores:
I found Bada Bing Bada Boom to have the best flavor of them all. It's very rich, delicious and velvety. All the guests at the wedding raved about the chocolate being very delicious. I tried Merkens initially - it was good, but not as good as the Bada Bing Bada Boom because more strict temperature requirements made it harder to get a product with a shiny, smooth surface free of the bloom effects that plague inexperienced chocolatiers. FYI: Bloom is the result of improperly tempering chocolate. It is a dull, white film on the surface of the chocolate. The product is fine to eat but looks less appealing and lacks the glossy, smoth surface indicating superior quality craftsmanship. The chocolate from Michael's may be good for certain things but I found it to be sub-par in taste and quality. In order to melt the chocolate you'll have to use a double boiler. You can buy one for about $35 or you can fashion your own with a pot of water and a bowl sitting on top of this pot of water. The temperature of the chocolate is very important whether you get compound chocolate or real chocolate. For this reason you should buy a chocolate thermometer as well. A general purpose digital thermometer works fine for this purpose even though it doesn't have a very fast reaction time and its accuracy is modest. Unfortunately, the really cool laser thermometers are not all that good for purposes of chocolate cooking since you would need to constantly mix the chocolate to get a valid internal temperature re Look here to find a good chocolate thermometer for $11:
With Bada Bing Bada Boom you will heat it to about 110 degrees then let it cool to about 96 degrees for best results. Once it is at 96 you can start brushing it onto the first half of your mold cavity using a new paint brush. Once the first half is coated, move on to coating the second half. Combine both halves of the mold together and brush chocolate along the cracks to make sure no parts have been missed. You can let it set as is at this point or you can apply more chocolate. At this point I would pour the mold cavity about half full with chocolate and roll it around until I got a thick layer around the inside of the mold cavity. If the chocolate is too thin I found that it was far too fragile to get it out of the mold without breaking it. Wrap rubber bands around the mold in order to keep the two halves together until the chocolate sets. This takes about 1 to 2 hours for the chocolate to set fully. It doesn't have to be fully set in order to take it out of the mold, though. Once it is out of the mold you can set it out and let it fully set while you pour another mold. To get it out of the mold, just slowly and carefully flex the silicone to allow the chocolate shape to peel off the surface.
Some more useful links: Chocolate vs Coating Compound: About Tempering: Making candy using chocolate coatings: How to use candy molds and mold chocolate: How to use chocolate molds: Ghirardelli's Videos page: "working with chocolate" Introductory Tips from the Chocolate Mold Factory This guy made a chocolate "Han Solo in carbonite": | ||||||
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I liked the bells, but I felt like the looked unfinished somehow with a gaping hole in the bottom (even though that's how bells are in reality).
Eventually we decided to place a set of wedding trivia inside each bell and seal the bottom. We had the people at PostNet print the trivia onto sheets of velum plastic, then we rolled each piece into a scroll shape and tied it with a knot of shiny thread. The velum is a good option to use inside the chocolate as it does not absorb any chocolate and it doesn't give off any flavor to the chocolate. Once the scroll is placed inside the bell we capped the bottom of the bell with a chocolate circle and sealed it with melted chocolate from a cake decorating bag. To make the circles we poured some melted chocolate into a sheet form about 1/4 inch thick. Once the sheet solidifies, the circles can easily be made using a biscuit cutter of the appropriate diameter.
The wedding trivia is easy to find on google.com but here are a couple resources to find trivia: Wedding trivia:
Traditions & Superstitions: 50 Wedding Facts & Trivia: Wedding Traditions and Trivia:
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Once the bells are all sealed up I again started thinking that they seemed a little "unfinished" looking. Then we discovered something called Pearl Dust available at Michael's craft store. It is a vial of
super fine particles that can be easily brushed onto a chocolate surface. The surface instantly turns a metalic bronze color if you use the bronze version. In the image provided I am showing the green color only for reference because I had thrown away the packaging for the bronze. Pour the powder onto a plate and start brushing it onto the surface of the chocolate. Once the surface is fully coated, brush off the excess and it's done. After we brushed the bronze onto each bell we put them inside a cellophane bag and tied it with a green ribbon. The green ribbon also held onto an escort card which had the name of the person as well as the number of the table they were assigned to. | ||||||
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There is another way to create chocolate molds. This is through something called Vacuum Thermoforming. There is only a couple types of food-grade sheet plastic as far as I know. One is Vivak PETG and the other is Makrolon FD Polycarbonate - both of which are made by Sheffield plastics. Vivak is the best option for home use because it is cheap and easy to form with a household vacuum. It seems to be a pretty common item so you can get it at your local plastics supplier. Look for a thickness of between .02 and .06 inches depending on the level of detail you want. A thinner sheet will be better able to capture the detail of whatever you are creating a mold out of. All about Vivak PETG: Types of Plastics for molding chocolate: Some great info about vacuum thermoforming on a forum: All about making DIY vacuum thermoform equipment: Although I have not yet tried out vacuum thermoforming for chocolate molds I definitely look forward to trying it out soon. It is supposed to be a cheaper, easier alternative to silicone mold-making for chocolate. | ||||||
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