The first thing we did was melt the milk chocolate in a bowl over a boiling saucepan of water on the oven, then dip the half blown up balloons into the bowl of melted chocolate, so that half of them is covered in chocolate. We found that when doing this we had to wait for the chocolate to cool for a bit otherwise the heat of the chocolate burst the balloon, which consequently resulted in chocolate being splattered onto the ceiling. When placing the chocolate coated balloons onto a sheet of greaseproof paper, we also spooned a bit of chocolate onto the paper beforehand, to give the balloons a flat base.
Next we made the cupcakes using a simple mixture. We weighed two eggs and then used this weight to measure out the flour, sugar, and butter as well. Putting the cake mixture into silicone cake cases, we put them in the oven for 20 minutes or so until cooked. We mis-timed the cakes a bit however, so some of them were a little burnt.
We next made the cookie mixture, using a simple recipe off the internet, which used the same ingredients as the cupcakes but in different measures. We added a bit of melted chocolate to the cookies as well and also some chocolate drops as well. We then rolled small balls of cookie dough into balls and placed them into a baking tray, then put them in the oven to cook for about 10-15 minutes.
Once the cupcakes were cooked we left them to cool whilst mixing up buttercream icing. When the cupcakes were cool enough to be iced, we transferred the buttercream icing into a icing pipe and piped the icing onto the cupcakes, covering the whole top of the cupcakes. We initially tried quite a large nozzle, however this made the icing far too thick for the size of the cupcake, and used up way too much icing as well. We settled for a smaller, more star like nozzle instead. After icing all the cupcakes, we then decorated them using a selection of christmas themes sprinkles, including candy canes, christmas trees and holly leaves.
To decorate the cookies once they had cooled also, we melted some more milk chocolate on the oven and the spooned the melted chocolate onto the cookies, so that it drizzled down the sides and covered all of the top of the cookies. We then decorated the cookies using the same christmas sprinkles as we used for the cupcakes. We put the cookies in the fridge to help set the chocolate.
We left the cookies over night to set, also allowing time for the chocolate balloon cups to set as well. The next day we burst the balloons coated in chocolate using a sewing needle, gently popping them by making small holes near the tie in the top of the balloon. We had to make several holes to allow enough air to escape for the balloon's to go down at a reasonable rate. This was a bit of a dodgy business as if you put a hole in the wrong place the balloon burst suddenly ruining the chocolate cup, as it burst with the balloon. When letting the air out of the balloons, we found we had to squeeze the air out of the balloon, which proved tricky as most of the time the chocolate wanted to cave in with the balloon, which destroyed the cup. It was really tricky peeling the balloon away from the chocolate, as it didn't come away easy, and a lot of it got stuck to the balloon, especially if the chocolate was too thin. We found that we had coated the balloons way too thinly, because the cups broke so easily, and weren't sturdy at all. The balloons we chose to use for chocolate cups had "happy birthday" and a little drawing on them, which when we came to peel the balloon away from the chocolate, got really really stuck to the chocolate, so much so that the writing and picture was transferred onto the inside of the chocolate balloon, which isn't very safe at all. Pretty much all of our chocolate cups failed. They crumbled and fell apart and didn't remain in any firm structure as we were hoping whatsoever.
This ruined our initial plans for our edible type, and we had to quickly think about what other things we could do with our cookies, cupcakes and broken bits of chocolate. We struggled then to fit a typeface into our designs, as we were going to write the letters onto the cupcakes and cookies, but now if we did that you wouldn't be able to tell it was an advent calendar. We came up with the idea of breaking up some of the chocolate cups into really small pieces and sticking these pieces into the icing on the cupcakes to look like of like the typeface Jokerman, which is admittedly an awful typeface but we were pulling at straws. We also thought this made the cupcakes look like birds nests, which is kind of Christmassy too. We then placed some of the cupcakes in the remaining chocolate cups, so the chocolate cups acted as a bowl. On all of the cupcakes and cookies, we iced on the numbers 1-25 using melted down white chocolate. Once we took the cookies out of the fridge after being in there over night, we found they had gone quite hard from being in a cool environment for such as long time, so we probably shouldn't of put them in the fridge, but let the to set at room temperature instead to avoid them going a bit like bricks. This actually looked really effective on the cookies, as the white chocolate icing stood out really well against the milk chocolate cookies. It didn't stand out so well against the white icing on the cupcakes however, but we were running out of time and chocolate.
This is our final edible type outcomes. We arranged the cupcakes and cookies from numbers 1-25, so that they still worked as a kind of advent calendar. In transit I took a couple of the cookies and cupcakes, and thought they would be okay in a tuppaware box laid flat at the top of my rucksack, however I was wrong and when I brought them to university in the morning they had all slid into one another and the icing ruined. Luckily the general theme was messy and haphazard so you couldn't tell that much. Even so I will know to be more careful next time.
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