A chocolate coating machine works in the round to enrobe mint Oreos.

Chocolate-Coating Machine Mk. 2: The Merry-Go-Round

November 28, 2024 by Kristina Panos 16 Comments

This holiday season, [Chaz] wanted to continue his family’s tradition of enrobing a little bit of everything in dark chocolate, and built an improved, rotating chocolate-coating machine.

You may remember last year’s offering, aka the conveyor belt version. Although that one worked, too much chocolate was ultimately lost to the surface of the kitchen table. [Chaz] once again started with a standard chocolate fountain and bought a round wire rack that fits the circumference of the bowl at the bottom. He snipped a hole in the center large enough to accommodate the business part of the fountain and printed a collar with holes that he cleverly zip-tied to the rack.

[Chaz] also printed a large gear to go around the bowl, a small gear to attach to a six RPM motor, a motor mount for the bowl, and an air blade attachment for a portable Ryobi fan. The air blade worked quite well, doing the double duty of distributing the chocolate and thinning out the coating. Plus, it gives things a neat rumpled look on the top.

Want to make some special chocolates this year, but don’t want to build an enrober? Get yourself a diffraction grating and make some rainbow goodies with melted chocolate.

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Whole-Fruit Chocolate: Skipping The Sugar By Using The Entire Cacao Pod

May 28, 2024 by Maya Posch 34 Comments

Images of whole-fruit chocolate formulations after kneading at 31 °C and subsequent heating to 50 °C. The ECP concentration in the sweetening gel and the added gel concentrations into the CM are shown on the x and y axis, respectively. (Credit: Kim Mishra et al., Nature Food, 2024) — Images of whole-fruit chocolate formulations after kneading at 31 °C and subsequent heating to 50 °C. The ECP concentration in the sweetening gel and the added gel concentrations in the CM are shown on the X and Y axes, respectively. (Credit: Kim Mishra et al., Nature Food, 2024)

It’s hard to imagine a world without chocolate, and yet it is undeniable that there are problems associated both with its manufacturing and its consumption. Much of this is due to the addition of sugar, as well as the discarding of a significant part of the cacao pod, which harbors the pulp and seeds. According to a study by [Kim Mishra] and colleagues in Nature Food, it might be possible to ditch the sugar and instead use a mixture of cacao pulp juice (CPJC) and endocarp powder (ECP), which are turned into a sweetening gel.

This gel replaces the combination of sugar with an emulsifier (lecithin or something similar) in current chocolate while effectively using all of the cacao pod except for the husk. A lab ran a small-scale production, with two different types of whole-fruit chocolate produced, each with a different level of sweetness, and given to volunteers for sampling. Samples had various ECP ratios in the gel and gel ratios in the chocolate mixture with the cacao mass (CM).

With too much of either, the chocolate becomes crumbly, while with too little, no solid chocolate forms. Eventually, they identified a happy set of ratios, leading to the taste test, which got an overall good score in terms of chocolate taste and sweetness. In addition to being able to skip the refined sugar addition, this manufacturing method also cuts out a whole supply chain while adding significantly more fiber to chocolate. One gotcha here is that this study focused on dark chocolate, but then some chocolate fans would argue vehemently that anything below 50% cacao doesn’t qualify as chocolate anymore, while others scoff at anything below 75%.

Matters of taste aside, this study shows a promising way to make our regular chocolate treat that much healthier and potentially greener. Of course, we want to know how it will print. Barring that, maybe how it engraves.

3D Printed Cookies, Sort Of

January 5, 2024 by Kristina Panos 1 Comment

Are there any cookies that taste better than the ones you make yourself? Well, maybe, but there’s a certain exquisite flavoring to effort. Just ask [jformulate], who created these custom chocolate-topped butter cookies using a mixture of 3D printing, silicone, and of course, baking and tempering.

[jformulate] did this project along with a makerspace group, and the first thing they did was decide on some images for the cookies. Once a hexagon-shaped mold was created in Fusion360, the images were added in. Some had to be height-adjusted in order for the detail to come out.

Once these positives were printed, it was time to make the food-safe silicone molds that would form the custom chocolate toppers. If you don’t have a vacuum de-gasser, [jformulate] recommends pouring a thin stream from a high place to avoid air bubbles. You can always tap the mold several times on a flat surface as well to bring trapped air to the top.

Finally, it’s time to make cookies. [jformulate] has good instructions for tempering chocolate, as well as a recipe for the butter cookies that support the designs. As a bonus, [jformulate] shows how to make a fish-shaped hot chocolate bomb, and made Jolly Rancher (sadly not Wrencher) medallions using the silicone molds and a microwave.

For the semi-disappointed, directly 3D printing cookies is definitely a thing.

The Chocolate Must Flow This Holiday Season

December 7, 2023 by Kristina Panos 8 Comments

After a long December of hand-coating chocolates for relatives last year, [Chaz] decided that enough was enough and built a chocolate enrobing machine to do the dirty work for him. As a side project, he built a rotary tumbler to chocolate-coat things like wasabi peas, which we assume are designated for [Chaz]’s enemies.

This build started with an off-the-shelf chocolate fountain for which [Chaz] designed and printed a new nozzle in PLA. He also knocked off the flutes that make it fountain on the band saw and removed the rest of the material on the lathe.

The conveying bit comes from a conveyor toaster oven that [Chaz] had lying around — he removed the conveyor and hooked it up to a motor from his collection using a slightly modified flex coupler.

With the chocolate enrober complete, [Chaz] moved on building to the rotary tumbler, which is made from two thrift store pans hammered together at the edges and connects up to the front of a KitchenAid mixer. The final verdict was that this did not work as well as the enrober, but it wasn’t a complete bust — wasabi peas (and most of the kitchen) got coated in chocolate.

While we’re not sure we’d use that PLA chocolate pump more than once, we sure would like to enrobe some things in chocolate, and this seems like a good way to get it done. Check out the build video after the break.

Chocolate is good for more than coating everything in sight. Speaking of sight, check out these chocolate optics.

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several chocolate figurines of various sizes

Cast Your Own Holiday Chocolate Bunny, Or Rather Mouse

December 25, 2021 by Matthew Carlson 5 Comments

The art of forming and using a mold is, well, an art. The already tricky process would be made even harder by using a fickle material, like chocolate. This is exactly where [Alexandre Chappel] found himself as he tried to cast his own chocolate figurines.

The starting point was a 3D low-poly model of everyone’s favorite fictional electric mouse. He tweaked the model to add offsets so that after the model was vacuum formed, there would be something to clamp onto. [Alexandre] was left with four different pieces, and he vacuum-formed them with 1 mm PETG plastic. Electing for white chocolate to add coloring, he started heating the chocolate. Adding too much colorant resulted in a seized mess, so the process was a bit of trial and error. Finally, he poured in chocolate and spun it around to form an even layer of chocolate as a shell. The flashing lines were easy to trim with a utility knife.

The last thing to add was a little splash of color via airbrush and food-grade paint. The results are stunning, and even though the techniques are simple, the results came together nicely. The files are available on his website if you’re curious about making your own. If you’re curious about more clever casting techniques with chocolate, take a look at the creative use of diffraction grating to get iridescent chocolate.

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Iridescent Rainbow Chocolate, Just Add Diffraction Grating!

May 23, 2021 by Donald Papp 15 Comments

Chocolate plus diffraction grating equals rainbow chocolate

Here’s a great picture from [Jelly & Marshmallows] that shows off the wild effects of melted chocolate poured onto a diffraction grating. A diffraction grating is a kind of optical component whose micro-features act to disperse and scatter light. Diffraction gratings are available as thin plastic film with one side that is chock full of microscopic ridges, and the way light interacts with these ridges results in an iridescent, rainbow effect not unlike that seen on a CD or laserdisc.

It turns out that these micro-ridges can act as a mold, and pouring chocolate over a diffraction grating yields holo-chocolate. These photos from [Jelly & Marshmallows] show this effect off very nicely, but as cool as it is, we do notice that some of the letters seem a wee bit hit-or-miss in how well they picked up the diffraction grating pattern.

Fortunately, we know just what to suggest to take things to the next level. If you want to know more about how exactly this effect can be reliably accomplished, you’ll want to check out our earlier coverage of such delicious optics, which goes into all the nitty-gritty detail one could ever want about getting the best results with either melted sugar, or dark chocolate.

Tunes You Can Eat

December 14, 2020 by Chris Lott 15 Comments

This week retro-gadget collector and video blogger [Techmoan] featured perhaps the most delicious audio recording format that we know of — a chocolate gramophone record. (Video, embedded below.) Compared to his typical media format explorations, the chocolate record is of quite recent vintage. He first heard of them back in 2015 when Tasmanian artist [Julia Drouhin] offered chocolate recordings as part of her art project. The one that [Techmoan] finally obtained was from a UK chocolatier who offers them with custom labelling and your choice of two songs. There are some pointers in the video about how to playback your chocolate disk without ruining it (use the lightest stylus tracking force as possible). These disks are recorded at 45 RPM on one side only, and are about the same size as a standard single. But being about five times thicker, they pack a lot more calories than your typical phonograph disk.

No reflection on the Tewkesbury Town Band, but this is probably the lowest fidelity recording media ever, but at least you can eat it when you’re done listening — label and all. We hope the Mission Impossible movie producers are paying attention so we can see the secret audio briefing being eaten instead of going up in smoke next film.

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