Modelling Chocolate Head Demo

Warning: this post contains disembodied heads and mangled faces made out of chocolate. Sensitive viewers and young children who may be upset by such things should not scroll down, but click here instead for very sweet pictures of fostered kitties by another Kimberly who is not me (you can tell because she’s much nicer and doesn’t post such horrid things as disembodied chocolate heads).

I did my demonstration of making realistic heads and faces out of modelling chocolate for the Capital Confectioners’ Club here in Austin on Tuesday night, basing it on what I learned when making my Wolverine cake.

Although most of the Wolverine cake was destroyed, I kept the head on the excuse of having it around to do this demonstration after the show. I would never, of course, have kept it because having not-quite-Hugh-Jackman’s head in my cake display case is in any way amusing to me on a daily basis. No. That would be wrong.

*shifty eyes*

Anyhoo, that head looks like this:

I'm sure this will use Wolverine's regenerative powers to grow a buff and edible Hugh Jackman body any day now.

Even though it doesn’t look like Jackman, it evokes him well enough that people knew who it was supposed to be, and it does look quite human.

My original intent with the demonstration was to attempt to remake it again, possibly even getting closer to Jackman’s look. However, I soon realized that that head took about four or five hours and I only had about an hour for the demonstration. So I adapted the lesson to be a rough example of how things come together along with a more detailed handout and book references.

Therefore it really isn’t very surprising that the half of the face I worked for the demo came out looking like the mangled offspring of a union between Wolverine and Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg from “The Fifth Element”:

Zorg: Now With Muttonchop!

Then the true carnage began. See, I’d pre-modelled the basic head shape on the PVC before the demo to save time, but some attendees wanted to see how I’d arranged the cross piece of PVC inside (it is sideways because heads are longer front-to-back than they are wide ear-to-ear). So I turned him into TwoFace by ripping his head apart, muahahahaha:

Cue Psycho-esque horror music here.

Oh the humanity! Oh the horror! Oh wait why am I licking my fingers and why does this taste like chocolate nom nom nom...

Despite the freaky results, I was assured by attendees that much was learned and many of them seem keen to give modelling chocolate a try now that they’ve seen how it remains flexible so much longer than fondant or other usual edible media. Plus the half I did construct actually looks roughly human-ish, which isn’t bad for being stuck together willy-nilly in an hour at a bad angle in an IHOP banquet room (yeah, I got some funny looks from the main restaurant).

If you’re a paid club member and couldn’t come, let me know and I’ll email you a PDF of the handout. Everyone else: donate $3 or more to the cake club via Paypal to capital_confectioners at yahoo.com and include a note that you’d like the handout for this demo and once the treasurer lets me know the donation has come through, I’ll email it to you. Note that part of the handout is going to tell you to go buy/borrow the book Modelling and Sculpting the Human Figure because much of the advice is based on that book, so you might want to start with that.