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Chocolate Modeling Supplies

This is modeling chocolate and modeling. Chocolate is also known as candy clay candy leather. That sort of thing. The formula for making it is very simple. It's basically melted chocolate and warmed corn syrup. Ok, now then, when we make it, we you could do it over the stove, or you could do with a microwave. A microwave, of course, is much faster. But part of the thing that always freaks people out is that when you put it out and after you get it stirred and you put it onto a piece of wax paper something, you get some very interesting looking things. And people go a ruined a pound or half a pound of chocolate. So I just want to show you right off the bat. This is what it can look like, and the white has got a lot of I hope you can see that it's got a lot of stuff left in it. A little bit of this. Not too much on the dark chocolate. One of the things that you want to know is that on your light or your white chocolate is that that is a very delicate product white chocolate is a very del...

icate products so it's very easy to burn so if you overheat it you can burn it very easily if you are doing in your microwave you only want do it like thirty seconds at a pop and then stir it and let it kind of sit and get used to the temperature and then do another thirty seconds if it needs it um you're darker chocolates are a little more stable the other thing is is that you need to use a little less corn syrup with the white chocolate than you do with the darker chocolate you need to add more corn search for the darker chocolates um I have friends love working with candy clay or modeling chocolate that's their that's their forte they do everything in it it is not one of my favorites I just it's struggle with it and it's awesome people love it because of course it's chocolate but it's just one of those things that I I do okay with it but it's really not my favorite and I haven't got a huge forte part of it is is because I normally have incredibly cold hands so it makes it really hard to work with and the other thing is is that like I said I just sometimes it turns out great sometimes they have issues so this is how it looks and when you have it like that just peel it off and you can see it kind of bends like this and just start toe, work it and need it. We're going to be doing a lot of stuff that needs to be needed, which kind of gets dull and boring after a while, but you're going to develop such great upper body muscle from doing all this needing. So anyway, you just want to keep meeting it, and I am not going to bore you to tears with that, I promise. So I will show you one that I'm looking for one that I can even start with so as you can see by the time you get it needed, not get all that, um sometimes it's the cocoa butter is that literally come out so you're needing back in the cocoa butter and it should look like this when you're done on dh you can see it's very workable now if I keep handling it and keep loving it it's going to get soupy and slick, but right now I just want to get it soft enough to work with and I want to show you real quick with dark chocolate, you can see why they call it candy leather do you see why they call it candy leather? So if you were doing something like if you were doing a purse cake or something, this is awesome. For covering your purse cake and are making a purse cake out of because it really is kind of like a leather. Um, if you're doing a ten issue or a sports bag or something like that, those sort of things where it's not necessarily where you're trying to create something very delicate, this is and I see laughing yet in the my student audience here, they are really struggling with gave their candy claim needed, and you can see how this is working a little bit better than that white let's really tough. So with that being said now, then let's go over some of the tools that were going to use. Um, I'm going to be using a ball tool, fearsome different ball tools I'm going to be using this is a boner and you can see a vein er has got, um kind of a sharp edge and it's got a little more blunt edge, but that's a boner, these were the ball tools, hence has a low ball, thie intense the reason it's called a ball tool we're going to be using on exacto knife. I also have some leaf cutters. I have several different types of leaf cutters, and I'm going to be using some heart shaped cutters now I really like this one. It's nice and tiny it's gonna work great for a little face if you can't find one that small get his smaller she can and believe it or not, the other thing we're going to use is a plastic straw that you would stir like a coffee with because what we're going to do is we're going to trim the end so that we can use that to make little eyes and mouths and I'm also going to use a, um it's not teflon but it's ah stick resistant rolling pin really good for chocolate cause chocolate is guess what? Sticky? So I put my tools back over here so I don't lose too much and then the other thing that we're going to use is we have a little puff this is made out of a little nylon stocking that's tied up and inside of the puff is powdered sugar, so when we're working with chocolate, we don't want to have the corn starch like we did with the bonding like we will for the gum paste we want to have, um pattern sugar when we're working with our chocolate ok and that's and then I have lots and lots of chocolate so let's go ahead and get started the first thing I'd like to do is I want to work with my green a little bit and I'm going to get it needed so I can work it I see my students are just struggling getting their chocolate workable it was eighty six degrees yesterday when I drove in with my things that didn't stand up to it and I was hoping now you can see on this green I still have some of the cocoa butter that's not worked itself back in very well you can either stand and work it back in or you can chuck it either way it's just a matter of getting it warm and working it this is where we get to watch paint dry do we have any questions yet? Do you ever use modeling chocolate for like any figurines on cakes or do you just try and stay away from it? Oh no, they're great for little figurines um I just did a baby shower cake a couple weeks ago that was a safari theme and we had it covered with giraffes and tigers and elephants and monkeys and turtles and birds and all kinds of fun things on dh that's what I want to start with first is I want to show you how to do a bamboo um not a bamboo palm tree wrong wrong vegetation there so we want to do a palm tree kind of look and part of the reason why I want us to start with that is because any time you're doing something like a palm tree or a flower, your petals don't necessarily with modeling chocolate, they don't necessarily dry, but they do kind of firm up and set up and then if they sit for very long they will get dry, they dry out so sometimes with some of these things, you need to make him a little bit ahead of time and let him kind of get their footing back underneath. Um, um, is there an advantage to what about using, like funding for those same types of decorations or would use only use modeling? Well, see and that's that's, my thing is, I love working with the font and and you can do a lot of things with the funds that you can't do with the chocolate. The differences is the fund that you get this little hard thing that's made out of sugar chocolate, you have a chocolate and people are like it's chocolate, so I'm getting that piece nice and soft I'm gonna have to stand up to meet I cannot do this sitting down. So listen to can you tell us the difference between using the molding chocolate and gum paste for figures? Well, gum paste is, um it's a very fast drying and you can work done paste incredibly thin, you are not going to be able to work the modeling chocolate is thin as you can the gum paste they're two very, very different medium's um, we do most of our flowers and delicate worker done and gum paste and most of your heavier figures and that sort of thing or done either in the modeling chocolate or found it and, um, your gun pace is a little more expensive to make so price wise, you're probably better off going with funding because, of course, chocolates, chocolates. I also want to say that when you're making the chocolate, you can I added my color in while I had it melted in with soft, but if I have an all white batch and I want to add color into it, you just take your your coat, your paste, your your colors and just need him in it's very, very easy, very easy I say is you're struggling with needing not so easy, really? Okay, I have quite a bit of once here, but I'm going to move forward, so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to use my small rolling pin and I'm going to try to smush out some of that don't you guys love it when you see me struggling with something makes you go? Yes, I'm not alone even the experts have problems have another have another green here I'm curious to see if this one's mixed better, so I have a question for you how did you know and it's right consistency when it's workable for you if it's too you know when it gets to the point where it's too soft let it go let it sit off news is soft but I still don't have all the stuff worked in this one is a little better and I'm sorry guys, I just feel like what we're doing at this point it is watching paint dry ok? This one is a little better it's still a little stiff but I'm going to go ahead and move forward with it as I needed love it hold it up next to my hotness you probably could put this in the microwave and nuke it for just a second or two but I wouldn't want to risk it okay, so what I've done is I've puffed my surface with a little bit of powdered sugar because this is really sticky and then you think to yourself powdered sugar is and that's gonna make it stickier will my husband bless his heart help got up bright and early this morning and help me need all this stuff because when I got here yesterday all of maya chocolate was pretty well pretty well gone and one of the things that I discovered is that the green seems to have some sort of chemical reaction when I added it really made it wacky, so I had to ad it afterwards okay who look at that it's looking pretty good huh? Okay now before I start to do anything I want to lift this up make sure it comes off the surface and look how leathery it is that's why they call it leather so let's go ahead and powder sugar that surface down again and I brought several different leaf cutters I don't know which kind of leaf cutter you have but if you don't have a leaf cutter a teardrop a teardrop shaped cutter will work this one's one of my favorite self and since I'm the boss I get to use my favorite I don't get to be the boss very often but occasionally you know I get to be the boss of cake get the boss stuff around this is chocolate and it does have cocoa butter in it so if you were to create something and put it on a cardboard guess what would happen in a very short time your cardboard would suck up all the fat and get greasy looking so you need to make sure that if you're building something that you okay all that rolling so I could get that so let's take rv owner and this is um this tool is a gym tool there you can tell a gym tool j m and you can tell jim tools because they're black and I have to tell you the gym tools or probably my favorites um and what I'm going to do is not put that in the palm of my hand I'm going to use thes sharp end of my vein or tool and I'm going to just pull it right down the center, add some veins in there and then I want to pinch the end together and give it a little shape and I'll just set it over here so that it can start to set up so down the center little veins and just let it start to sit up and we'll just do a few of those they don't have to all turn and twist the same direction because guess what that's not the way it happens in nature pinch twist full been given a little natural look a si m eighty three would like to know what is the approximate thickness that you're rolling out and his thickness important? Well, these air a little on the fixed side that's probably about oh maybe a quarter to an eighth of an inch but the thicker you have it, the more it's going to hold up. Of course the thinner it is the more delicate it's going to look um it just kind of depends on what it is that you're trying to create now if I'm doing some little, you know, critters that are going on to a baby shower cake and they're kind of chunky, lumpy little critters if I have chunky, lumpy little palm trees, it's, not the end of the world, if I'm creating something that's more natural, realistic looking, I may not want to have it quite that thick, so whatever it is that your body temperature can handle because the heat of your hands is going to have an effect on this, the heat of your room is going to have an effect on this. Um, you're outside temperature, you could be working in a great environment, and if you have to go deliver it across town and you don't can't keep it cool enough, you could have issues. Um, so you need to take all of those things in consideration when you're rolling out how thick it isthe. And speaking of rolling out a raise, angela would like to know, can you use the plastic to roll out chocolate like he did the funding that's exactly what I'm working on it, I'm using yeah, and you can do the same thing. You just need to make sure that you wash it in between and be careful, because when you're washington, so say like, if I need to wash something, but I've got another fund that cake to do in the next ten minutes, I need to make sure that that surface is really dry before I start again, because that water is going to cause issues, it's going to melt it and cause stickiness. And it will not be nice. So sometimes it's better to work on things that have just been wiped down and art thoroughly clean and disinfected. Sometimes you need to wait a little bit.