Welcome to How To Cook That I'm Ann Reardon and today we are making this huge Wonder Woman
Pop Art Roy Lichtenstein picture out of 100% CHOCOLATE!
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To make this crazy, sweet creation print out the pop art artwork nice and large and trace
around all of the red and pink parts onto some acetate and cut them out.
Colour some white chocolate using oil-based food colouring and spread it thinly on your
acetate.
Then add the lip pieces upside down onto the chocolate.
And the reason I am going to add them upside down is two-fold, 1 because the acetate on
the bench side is completely flat, whereas the stuff I'm putting on top is a little bit
curved.
And 2 because air bubbles rise up to the top and we don't want any air bubbles on our pieces
so this way when we flip it over we get the nice, perfect side for our artwork.
Once that is starting to set cut around the shapes using the acetate as your guide, and
you can see there right in the middle of the lip there is a big air bubble and that's why
we are using the other side, not this side.
Add a whole heap more colour to get that bright red colour.
To get it this intense I am using coloured cocoa butter which is another way you can
colour chocolate - you just melt the coloured cooca butter in the microwave and then add
it and mix it in.
So you can use that or you can use powdered oil based food colouring.
You can't use your gel or your liquid food colours because they have the liquid, the
water in the them will seize the chocolate.
Spread out the red chocolate and add the pieces over the top and cut around those too.
When you're cutting out the shapes make some extra cuts running out towards the edge and
this will just make it easier to get these pieces off.
If you just have one large outside piece it may be tricky to get off without breaking
your shapes.
But if you have lots of little ones it is easier to get them all off.
For the white colour I am using white cocoa butter on its own and I am spreading it out
really thinly onto some acetate.
This is a bit like making your own chocolate transfer sheet.
White chocolate is actually quite yellow as you know so to try and colour it really white
is bit tricky.
Add the tempered white chocolate over the top and put your pieces into place.
Just like before we need to cut around each one.
Colour and temper some blue chocolate.
And to get this bright a blue I used a whole packet of powdered blue food colouring - that
cartoony blue is pretty intense but it looks awesome.
Add your pieces over the top, there are so many blue bits it is a bit like doing a jigsaw
puzzle to get them to fit.
Just start with the biggest pieces and work down to the smaller ones and you should be
right.
Then trace around each of those pieces using your knife.
Working with chocolate like this takes a long time because you have to temper each batch
of chocolate.
Now if you don't know what tempering is, what it does is it makes all the crystals in the
cocoa butter line up really tightly together so that it sets firmly and room temperature.
So the chocolate is not all soft at room temperature.
If you don't know how to do that there's several ways you can do it at home and I've got a
video called CHOCOLATE SECRETS which shows you how you can do that at home.
But it does take a little bit of time.
Each time you want to melt some chocolate, you need to temper that chocolate so there's
a lot of tempering going on in this artwork.
Lighten some of your blue by adding more white chocolate and of course temper that.
Then add the eye pieces on top and cut around them.
To make the skin with those iconic pop art dots you'll need some bubble wrap.
Now this one has raised bubbles on one side and smooth plastic on the other.
Some bubble wraps have that smooth plastic on both sides - and you can't use that type
so make sure you get this one that has the bubbles.
Using permanent marker trace the shape of the face and all the other dotty areas of
skin onto the smooth side of the bubble wrap.
And make sure you also mark down the area on the face that is plain and not dotty too.
Cut along the lines that you've just drawn so that you end up with 5 pieces of bubble
wrap.
Melt 2kg (4.4LB) of white chocolate and temper it of course and then spread that out onto
a large silicon fondant rolling mat, or if you don't have one of those you could use
some foil under it instead.
Level it using a spatula as best as you can and then gently press the bubble wrap down
on top.
Look at all those dots perfectly lined up.
Add all of the rest of the pieces and check that the chocolate is coming up in between
each of the bubbles to fill that area up.
If it's not, just gently press down with your fingers to get it to fill up.
Cover that whole thing in non-stick baking paper or you could use foil.
Then place something heavy and flat over the top and push it down gently to make your pieces
are level.
Remove those and once the chocolate is starting to set but is still soft, use a knife to cut
around each piece.
Once it is set remove the excess and place it in a bowl.
Peel off the bubble wrap so you're left with this beautiful, textured chocolate.
Look at that, doesn't it just look perfect!
Melt the white chocolate off-cuts and put some of them in a smaller bowl and add to
that some oil-based food colouring.
To make the cartoony pink, I'm using some red and then to off-set the yellowy tone from
the chocolate I am adding the tiniest amount of blue.
Once you're happy with that shade, you can then colour the big bowl of the white chocolate
and temper that and then pour it over the set chocolate.
By test colouring on a small batch first if you make a mistake you haven't ruined the
whole lot.
That's why I encourage you to just colour a small bowl and then the rest.
Now it doesn't matter here if you still have a thin layer of pink over the top of the white,
in fact that's just fine, that'll make sure that they're all full.
So just have it very thin going over the top and I'm just going to work on one piece at
a time here because they are such big pieces.
Once that pink chocolate is starting to set take a scraper and run it across the top to
scrape back a thin layer so that then you can see the pattern that we are after underneath.
Continue scraping it back and if you have any areas which are a little bit recessed,
like I've got a little bit here, then you may need to use the edge of a spoon or a sharp
knife to scrape those back.
I am so glad that this worked!
In my head when I came up with the idea I thought yeah this will definitely work but
once I'd actually committed so many blocks of chocolate to this and so much time tempering
and cutting out all of the template pieces I started to have doubts of what if this doesn't
work!
But it's looking beautiful so we're all on track.
Now because we've scraped it back it does have a really fine white sort of dust over
the top of it, I don't know if you can see that but the chocolate looks a little bit
dull when it's been scraped.
So to bring it back to life what you need to do is fold some paper towel and dip it
in some ice cold water and rub it all over the surface, I don't know if you can see the
difference on the camera here.
Here is before and after, before and after - it's not a lot of difference, I can probably
see it better with my eyes than you can see on camera.
Temper some dark chocolate and add to that some black oil based food colouring.
Keep adding more and more until you get a really good black colour.
Pour it onto a big sheet of acetate and place the black pieces on top.
Now I have only cut out the bits that are on the face here not the hair, we will do
all of those bits later.
At this point I realized I am going to need a LOT more dark chocolate and a baseboard
for the artwork.
So after I've cut these out I'll pause filming and go and buy another 20 blocks of dark chocolate,
2 more blocks of white and some wood for underneath!
These little tiny ones are going to be fiddly to cut out so I'm just going to pipe those
ones instead.
Ok back from the shops now we need lots of foil to cover the board.
My local hardware store cuts the MDF wooden pieces to size which just saves me a lot of
time getting out the power tools.
And then just wrap the foil around the edges and tape that into place.
Once it's all taped up, flip it over so that we've go the foil side facing up.
Now we're going to need some wood to make a frame so the chocolate doesn't just drip
off the edges.
Take each of the pieces of wood and wrap it in foil just squeezing it at the ends.
Tape each corner into place so that it sits like a frame around the edge.
The frame is not actually attached to the base board and this is so that we can remove
it later.
But we want it to sit nice and tightly and snug around the baseboard.
Place the printout into the frame and use that to position the areas of skin.
For the larger pieces you can kind of hold it and hover into place then move the paper
out.
For the smaller pieces I found putting it underneath and then just feeling with my fingers
to check if they're in the right place and adjusting them accordingly is what worked.
Temper some more white chocolate.
Then add some silicone bake snakes at the top and bottom of the face or if you don't
have those you could use foil here instead.
Pour that tempered chocolate into the gap and for the finer areas I'm just going to
use a piping bag just to make sure I'm getting into each of the corners and that it didn't
drip it everywhere.
While that is setting we want to melt and temper our dark chocolate.
And into that I'm also going to mix the leftovers of black chocolate that we had.
That's going to darken it a little, it's not going to make it that full black.
I would just need SO MUCH colouring to get this much chocolate black.
So I'm going to leave it that browny chocolatey colour.
Pour a jug full of dark chocolate up the top area and spread it out for her hair, trying
to get it as smooth as you can.
If you get a little bit over the skin don't worry we'll fix that up later just get it
as thin as you can, just use a piece of paper towel and just wipe off as much as you can.
Add the headband into place in the top corner there.
And then get some more jugs of chocolate ... this is a VERY BIG artwork, this is a lot of chocolate
going into this!
Pour that into the next section and spread it down and around to fill all the way to
the edges.
Because this chocolate piece is her hair, try and make the lines from your spatula in
the same direction as her hair should flow.
So run it from the top down towards her shoulder.
You can lift up that little shoulder piece while you spread the chocolate through that
gap and then just pop it back carefully into place.
Next carefully add your blue pieces where they should go, starting with the bits that
sit on the edges because the chocolate at the edge is going to set faster than the middle.
I love the shapes of all these pieces, they all flow.
They're a bit art nouveau sort of look to the shapes.
Temper a whole heap more dark chocolate and pour that into the final section.
Spread it out using a spatula and then use a piping bag for those finer areas.
If your piping bag happens to pop like mine did - that's a bit of a bummer!
Then just push as much of that chocolate off the skin as possible.
Then add all of those blue and red pieces into place using your picture for reference.
Jut keep looking at your picture and keep checking that for reference so you know where
they go.
Again try and do the ones that are touching the edge first because that chocolate is going
to set first.
Once it is set use a sharp knife just to scrape off any of the dark chocolate on the skin
area that should not be there.
And now to add the face.
Cut your template and place it on the chocolate.
And use it to position the lips, then remove the paper.
You can 'glue' it into place using some dark chocolate and then add the pink lips and the
white teeth on top and glue those into place using chocolate too.
Continue using the template to add the pieces to where they go.
And you may have noticed there are 2 white dots on the face, that was where there must
have been 2 bubbles on the bubble wrap that were popped so they didn't make a hole.
I'm kind of hoping that one of these black pieces is going to cover that and disguise
it.
There you go one of the eyebrows ... it's not covering it, it's not over the top but
it's close enough that we don't notice it so much anymore.
Add the white of the eye and then the black over that and the bottom eyeliner should sit
just underneath that.
Add the blue iris, then the black pupil on top of that.
If your back is aching from bending over chocolate art all day do some stretches...
And then put the other eye into place.
Pipe a tiny dot of white chocolate onto each eye.
Sign your 7kg (15LB) chocolate artwork in the corner.
Clean up the kitchen and then lie on the floor and take some photos and you're done!
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Make it a great week and I'll see you on Friday.