For my 29th birthday, I had my friends throw me a surprise birthday (thank you!) and so instead of spending a full month planning my birthday party I had all this free time.
What did I do with that free time? I learned how to make chocolate bars, from scratch, so I could give everyone a gift who showed up to my party.
I bought cacao beans, roasted them, blended them to make chocolate, and created 16 different flavor combinations to make chocolate bars for the ~50 people who came to my party.
I also made custom chocolate molds, designed the wrappers and left each bar with a special Golden Ticket inside for the recipient to redeem.
It's one of the most fun I've had building a project completely from the ground up.
initial sketches for the vibe, color development, trying to turn churned chocolate into a fun aesthetic
I made the initial molds of the bars out of clay which I then cast food-safe silicone molding over to create the chocolate bar molds
prototyping the golden ticket size, text and wrapping. I originally used a gold foiling on the paper but it was unreliable with the amount of toner I had in the ink and how evenly heated the laminator was so i had to scrap and just ended up using high quality gold cardstock instead.
how to make chocolate from scratch -
(1) get beans, (2) heat beans, (3) shell beans, (4) blend beans, (5) add milk powder, sugar, secret stuff, and love
(6) temper and melt chocolate, (7) add weird ingredients to chocolate
TEST with friends the delightful experience
(here flavors tested are: "licorice sprinkles" and "taki + ginger")
some of the 16 flavor combos. each combo was associated with color way of the package. And each golden ticket was themed and had a season also tied to the flavors. So I could hand a person a chocolate bar and know that their theme was "ADVENTURE" and they should redeem it in "SUMMER" just by the color / flavor of the bar.
some people actually redeemed their ticket, which was awesome! Here's some pics of people enjoying the experience, and the cyanotype-dye exercise i did with a friend who redeemed her ticket rather quickly.
