Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

As promised, here’s the other part of “Crafty Sunday” — making chocolates from DIY molds.

As I mentioned I recently ordered a bunch of silicone from MakeYourOwnMolds.com (I don’t know if they have the best prices because I haven’t really shopped around, but they had nice easy-to-follow tutorials on their page, and they shipped the supplies to me very quickly). Our first project was making a couple of ugly faces out of chocolate, but the possibilities are endless — I can cast soaps, candies, gummis, chalk, crayons, erasers, plastics, ice, and so much more because the silicone is non-toxic and foodsafe, and works across a wide range of temperatures.

We started by sculpting the faces out of Sculpey (a polymer clay a la Fimo). After baking (275°F for about twenty minutes), we put them on a smooth flat plastic surface and coated them with a thin layer of release agent (oil basically) to keep the mold material from sticking to our bucks. To prepare the silicone, I mixed equal parts of the base and catalyst by kneading them together by hand (we used the “silicone plastique” product, which has a clay-like consistency that’s really nice to work with). This took just a few seconds to do, giving a ten minute work time followed by about an hour to cure fully at room temperature. We first took small bits and rubbed them into the detail of the faces (to make sure there wouldn’t be any air bubbles) and then pushed the remainder of the silicone on top to form the body of the mold. Once cured, it was easy to pop the clay faces out by flexing the mold, and we saw that the molds looked great and had captured plenty of detail. Because we hadn’t sealed the bucks to the surface they were sitting on, some of the silicone flowed underneath, so I trimmed that excess with scissors.

We melted the chocolate in the microwave, on medium power so as not to burn it, pausing every thirty seconds to stir it. Once it was nice and liquid, we poured it into the molds, stirring it a bit to try and clear any bubbles (ideally a vibrator would probably have been helpful to move the bubbles to the surface), and then added some sprinkles to decorate the back since these were open one-sided molds (my next attempt will be a fully 3D two-part mold). I used a spatula to try and scrape off the excess chocolate, and then popped them in the fridge to cool off and harden.

Removing them from the molds was a simple matter of again flexing the silicone, although I did break off part of the tongue of mine, and some of the hair of Nefarious’s. You can also see that I didn’t put enough effort into making sure that there weren’t any air bubbles in the chocolate — most notably you can see a big one in the lower lip of Nefarious’s, and another in the nose of mine, as well as lots of smaller ones that wouldn’t be noticed unless you knew what the originals looked like.

Click these for a close-up look at how detailed they are (they’re about two inches high):

Given that this is the very first time that I’ve done something like this, I’m very happy with the results, and my brain is overflowing with ideas… There are so many things I can create now!