Chocolate Showpiece: Day One

Like many of you, I really had no clue that something called a chocolate showpiece even existed. I'm a small town girl at heart and these fancy-pants concepts had never even crossed my mind before I came to pastry school. However, now I'm here and I'm making one. Little old me and a sculpture of chocolate -- Lord help me.

Today was the first of four days that our class will dedicate to the showpiece and really it was a pretty basic day. We started by actually learning what a showpiece is. We learned that there are two different kinds: the French, which is designed in an "S" shape and usually has very figurative elements and the American, or as my chef said, the everywhere else style of sculpture, which is very literal and is less strict in terms of what elements it is required to have. Since our school teaches in the French style, my partner and I are trying to come up with a plan that suits the French style which is not as easy as it seems especially when our theme is "Breakfast at Tiffany's"...don't pretend you are surprised.

So once we came up with a theme and started planning out some of our elements, we tempered about five pounds of chocolate to begin to create the basic structure of our piece.

This is the neoprene mold that we...


Poured the chocolate into and let set...


And then unmolded.


On Monday we are going to shave this chocolate down and clean up the lines and edges and eventually, these shapes will be arranged, glued together and sprayed with chocolate to cover up any imperfections.

In addition to the chocolate shapes, we also made these perfectly shiny little half-spheres that will eventually be glued together to become little globes that will be used, somehow, in our showpiece.


Lord mercy. Wish me luck for next week, I must admit that I feel a touch out of my element.