CHOCOLATE PAINTING: Guest Post by Amber Royer

I love when my mystery and chocolate worlds collide. Today I welcome back Amber Royer, mystery writer and chocolate maven! Amber Royer writes the Chocoverse space opera series, and the Bean to Bar Mysteries. She is also the author of Story Like a Journalist: a Workbook for Novelists, and has co-authored a chocolate-related cookbook with her husband. She also teaches creative writing and is an author coach.

AMBER ROYER: CHOCOLATE PAINTING

A couple of years ago, I took a class where we painted with colored cocoa butter, onto the smooth side of chocolate bars. The class was a lot of fun, and I duly Instagrammed about it and filed the information away to fit into my mystery series that stars a bean to bar chocolate maker. That class led directly to the newest book in the series, A Study in Chocolate, where I riff on the title in several ways. One of those is to have my protagonist offered the opportunity to sit for a chocolate painting. This would be a more elegant take on what I’d done in the class, with the artist using only different shades of chocolate, from dark to a caramelly white.

Such paintings are available commercially, either as commissioned works or showpieces. On a large scale, chocolatiers in Spain did a life-size reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica out of chocolate.  https://www.thestar.com.my/lifestyle/culture/2021/04/23/picasso039s-039guernica039-the-world039s-most-famous-anti-war-painting-recreated-with-chocolate

And you can buy a detailed chocolate portrait of Marilyn Monroe, Charlie Chaplin or Audrey Hepburn done on a chocolate “canvas” for roughly $700.  (It claims to have a shelf life of a year.) https://globalrustrade.com/products/chocolate-painting-marilyn-monroe/  The artists do the work to order, to deliver the freshest art possible.

I even found a site that advertises chocolate portraits (or mosaics) of the bride and groom for weddings, with the idea that the piece will be smashed with a hammer and distributed to the guest as a party favor.  https://www.foodisart.co.uk/services/weddings-celebrations/

There are a number of on-line tutorials if you want to try your hand doing your own chocolate painting.  

These boil down to two basic techniques:

You can paint on the slab of chocolate you are using as a canvas, using a brush, creating strokes and textures similar to an oil painting. If you want to sketch out your work first, use edible markers (made with food coloring – available from cake supply shops or some craft stores). You will either need to work quickly, so that your tempered chocolate doesn’t solidify before you can paint with it, or devise a method of keeping it warm while you work. (You can actually buy a chocolate warming pallet, with cups to hold multiple shades or colors of chocolate, or improvise with a silicon tray in a crock pot.)

The other method is more similar to how chocolatiers make hand-painted filled chocolates using molds, where they paint the inside of the mold first, then pour chocolate onto the design. For this method, you need a sheet of acetate. You paint the image you want onto the acetate. Remember to do it backwards – with the detail work face-down on the acetate.  Then you pour tempered chocolate over the top of your image, let it set, then flip it over and remove the acetate.  The benefit of this method is that you can trace an image from a photograph or other source onto the acetate to outline your work.  But you lose most of the sense of texture or brush strokes, as the acetate serves to make for a flat finished surface.

Here is my attempt to paint Ruffles, the cat you see on the cover of A Study in Chocolate.  Not only was it fun, but it felt a bit meta, since this is similar to something the characters do in the book.

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