Charles Smith

Portfolio: Chocolateering
Engineering + Chocolateering

Custom Chocolates Phase Two

A fellow recently made me rethink just how important context is for objects. My goal with the chocolates below was to experiment with making chocolates that have a much more compelling relationship with the chocolate next to it than any I've ever seen. I quite happy with these prototype results.

Oh, don't worry about the metallic sheen, it's quite edible. I've co-opted a special cake decorating material to give these chocolates a unique color in addition to the shape.

Necklace of yum.	Any similarity to the microsoft logo is purely coincidental.	Simple arrangement.	Complex 1	Complex 2

Custom Chocolates Phase One

I designed the chocolates Solidworks, cleaned up contours in AutoCAD, did the tool path planning in Mastercam, cut the MDF board on a CNC router, and thermoformed thin plastic sheets over the wooden tooling.

The guys in the machine shop (who are first in line to get samples of the newly made chocolates) are enthusiastic supporters of further experiments.

Four recent mold design tools.	A stack of twelve molds made from the tooling on the left

What's your favorite flavor?

Included in the picture here are peppermint, port, almond, orange, lemon, coffee, and maple flavored truffles. Mixed in amongst them are dark chocolate peanut butter cups, vanilla candy bark, and almond toffee. The peppermint is my house specialty.

At the far right is a close up of tiny purse-shaped chocolates custom made for the release party for a book written by a friend of mine. This was the first custom mold I made, and its tooling was literally hand carved out of a spare 2x4 I had laying around.