OUGD405 EDIBLE TYPE INITIAL IDEAS

To start off this brief I joined up with two of my friends and we started mind mapping all of our ideas.

This is our mind map of ideas. Our initial idea was to create a cake in the shape of a castle in the shape of a letter, possibly a "H" to get the turrets in easily. We then thought that this idea might be a bit too complicated for our baking abilities however. We thought about having cake looking like a pizza in the shape of a letter, with burger and pizza sweets to make up the toppings on the pizza, but then thought this might also be a bit tricky to get right, and everybody was going to bake a cake, we wanted to do something different. We then had the idea of making our own chocolate baubles by coating balloons in chocolate and leaving them to dry, then popping the balloon to leave the chocolate bauble. These baubles could be presented by being hung on a tree, either fake of cake shaped. Following on from this idea we thought of making cake pops, which are circular little cakes, and them dipping them in chocolate to make cake baubles. We could also decorate them to look like christmas puddings maybe. This was a great idea however it has no typographic element to it. Our next idea was to make an advent calendar, perhaps with the advent calendar made out of a cake with holes in it for all the goodies to go into. We thought about making our own sweets to put in an advent calendar, either boiled sweets or melting chocolate and making chocolate letters from the melted chocolate leaving them to set again. We puzzled a lot over how we could actually make our advent calendar, would it have pockets or drawers or santa sock pouches? To help us with this we looked at a few tutorial videos on YouTube on how to make your own DIY advent calendar, some were useful some really weren't.

This is the kind of gothic castle cake that we thought about producing, as it would be fairly easy to make it into a specific letter.

This was the video we found on YouTube on how we could make our own paper advent calendar, if we went for this option.

This was the photograph I found on the internet that gave me the idea for cake pop baubles, as this cake pop looks just like a bauble and has been coated in chocolate and looks delicious.

This is the photograph that gave us the idea of having something inside of the chocolate baubles, almost as a surprise, either meted inside the bauble and closed shut, or as we finally decided inside a chocolate cup with a chocolate cup covering it over.

These are the christmas pudding cake pops that inspired the cake pop ideas as well, as these little Christmas puddings are really cute, however not very typographical.

After all of this exploration of ideas we settled on a combination of a few different things. We will make the chocolate baubles using balloons, but only coating half the balloon so it makes a chocolate cup. We will make 52 of these, with half slightly bigger than the other half. We will also make 26 sweet items to go inside of the chocolate cups, a combination of little cupcakes and cookies. We will then ice the cookies and cupcakes and ice a letter onto each of them, making up the whole alphabet. These sweet items will then be put inside of the chocolate cups, and the larger chocolate cup placed on top of a smaller chocolate cup and a number 1-26 iced onto the chocolate cup lid using white chocolate. We will organise these chocolate pouches in a grid format on the table.

This photograph shows how we went about trying to decide how to lay out and organise our advent calendar idea, and how the sweet items go inside the chocolate cups, and how we'd lay them out on the table.