Chocolate Sculpture week final

The New Mexico Museum of Natural History held its annual Chocolate Fantasy Event this past Saturday in Bernalillo at the Hyatt Tamaya Resort. There were plenty of scary masked people in attendance

and the event included a Parade of Chocolate bon bons

which was funny since many of the servers had such sour faces!

But, what a great crowd! 3oo in attendance.

Our bon bons were judged the best of the event - rosemary salted caramel. Our sculpture drew a very positive response from the audience. Our title was Venice Crumbles, honoring the corrosion of the city into the canals. I used a number of new techniques for this sculpture including 50 paper thin dress panels and the detail on our column.

The column was actually made to be pink marble but my coloring was off so we sprayed it with a mustard yellow cocoa butter which created an effect that we preferred.

There are a few corrections we would make in the future. First, the judges were all traditional pastry chefs, so we should have stuck to a very traditional design and technique. One of my criticisms of traditional sculptures is that they lack artistic life. They're very static and meant to look good on a buffet table. That said, the judges are the audience for an event like this. We should have also not used my favorite skull mold and continued the folk art style used on the hands and feet. Those changes, I believe, could have made a big difference in our outcome.


Here are many of the other entrants. This one was 100 pounds of modeling chocolate with very expressive detail.


A fun interpretation by a Native American culinary school program

One of the resort entrants

A restaurant entrant - some beautiful hand work on this one

Another resort entrant and one of my favorites

Dancing chocolate figurines

Our former intern, Patrick Abalos' entry for NM State Univ.

One of the restaurant winners - if you stood in front of the chocolate costume you would see yourself wearing it in the mirror on the wall.

Beautiful detail

The overall winner from Hard Rock Casino - well executed traditional design