Free Advertizes

Someone was kind enough to send me free chocolate in the mail. The least I can do is provide free advertising in the form of a product review.

The chocolate came from Custom Chocolate Company, located in Vancouver, CANADA! Egads. The Canuckdian infiltration is already in full swing. :)

Custom Chocolate Company (hereafter referred to as CCC) sells custom made chocolate novelties (no, not those kind of novelties, Pam). They look to be like small chocolate trinkets in boxes, like you’d get at a wedding or on your pillow at a hotel.

The thing is that they custom make them for you. Say you are turning 50 and are having a party. You could have little chocolates in boxes that say “Pam’s big 5-0″ or something like that. They imprint it on the chocolate and on the boxes. It didn’t say so, but I think you can get a design on the box that is different from what’s on the chocolate. Here’s a pic of what I got from Bill at CCC:

Click for a closer look. Basically squares and rectangles, but the website show a chocolate CD in a CD case.

I’m just learning how to use the new camera so I wasn’t doing so well with the exposure. Anyway, each of these come in their own little box, wrapped in plastic (heh, heh. “wrapped in plastic” makes me think of that video), and color coded. The silver boxes have white chocolate, and the gold boxes have a dark or milk chocolate. I would assume that the color coding is so that you don’t accidentally eat white chocolate, which is a gross thing in general. For those of you who like white chocolate, you need to have your fool heads examined.

How’s the chocolate? Its not bad. I mean, there is really bad chocolate out there and things like this are notorious magnets for very bad chocolate because bad chocolate is incredibly cheap. But this stuff is ok. It took a little digging on the site but I found where they talk about the chocolate. Its Callebaut. The milk is a 35% cacao and the dark is 60%. I personally like my milk chocolate to be “stickier” and the dark to be more bitter, but I think most people would like this chocolate.

Now, like I said above, the point here is really what they do with the chocolate. They are custom making chocolate favors, if you will. You send them the design in electronic form (like a jpg file or something) and then they make it into a proof image, and they mold the chocolate based on that proof. Um…what? They skipped a step!

The most interesting part, for me, would be how they make the mold, which they don’t describe. I know how to make food grade molds, but how do they get the original model from the image file? I did manage to find a site that tells about making chocolate molds from images using photopolymer. Seems simple enough. Its like photolithography. The design is put onto a transparency inverted (raised image is white, background is black) which is placed over a layer of the photopolymer. The polymer is exposed to ultraviolet light through the transparency with the design. Light areas let light though to expose that area of the polymer, and dark areas block the light. The exposed areas are hardened by the UV light, and the unexposed areas are water soluble. After exposing, you simply wash away the unexposed areas to give you the inversion of the image you want to make a mold for.

Sidenote.  That site also has videos of doing thermoforming of molds!  Now its not just about chocolate molds, it can be anything.  I’ve always wanted to do thermoforming at home (did you know that’s what I did in Michigan?).  Back to our story.

I’m not sure that is how these guys do it. Looking at the fancy design on the big piece, its possible they use some other model making technique. After seeing this stuff, its gotten me thinking about chocolate again. Maybe there’s more science left in it. I would like to try mold making with chocolate to see if that would be a fun thing to do. For those rich philanthropists out there who want to help a poor starving chocolatier wannabe, please buy me this.

A big thank you to Bill for the free chocolate. For those in Canada (and in the US for that matter) who are planning a wedding or a party or just want to have chocolate favors for a special occasion, you may want to drop Bill a line and see what he can do for you. An extra bonus? Shipping is free!

One last thought, Bill. Here’s something you need to think about: 3-D. All these images are basically raised 2-D images. Is you can get these in 3-D, I think you’d have a serious edge over your competition. Think of a 3-D image like a face, where the nose protrudes from the front of the face. I have no idea how you’d do it from a 3-D image file, but if I figure out an easy and cheap way to do it, I’ll be calling you. :)

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 16th, 2008 at 11:22 pm and is filed under Just chocolate. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.