Making the famous chocolate bar the way it ought to be
As a Christmas tradition each year, I consume my favourite form of chocolate - an oversized Toblerone bar:
As a lifelong fan of Pimp That Snack, I have an appreciation for candies that are made bigger and better. The fine people at Kraft Foods certainly understand “bigger”, they now sell an enormous 9lb version of the Toblerone bar:
But when it comes to “better”, UK’s Poundland understands the objective - Twin Peaks is their version of Toblerone with double the mountains:
A respectable effort, but even this is unsatisfying to me. Toblerone is “the mountain chocolate bar” in all of its branding, but the bar itself is merely suggestive of a mountain. What if we made an actual mountain chocolate?
We know what we want to end up with: a pyramid-shaped chocolate, with sharply defined ridges. Pouring molten chocolate in a soft silicone chocolate mold will be the ideal approach, allowing us to carefully peel away the mold after the chocolate has set. The soft silicone mold will be created by pouring food-grade silicone into another master mold, which we will design and 3D print.
Our process will be:
Creating realistic 3D models of mountains should be straightforward: starting from a realistic heightmap we can extrude a 3D model. But where to get the realistic heightmap?
We could use real-life terrain, for example exporting a heightmap of a mountain from Google Earth. However, after a lot of search it is very difficult to find a real-life mountain which conforms to a perfect pyramid. We will need to create our own heightmap, subject to constraints. Terrain generation software is the easiest way to achieve this. I have played with Terragen in the distant past, but it seems like World Creator is the current best-in-class. We’ll use that.
Starting with a 2048x2048 resolution, with 1m per pixel precision, we start with play with parameters until we have a good starting point:
We apply the “Dunes” filter to get a more pyramidal shape:
Applying it a second time sharpens the features:
The “Ridged” filter finishes the job:
After a lot of experimentation, we want to avoid “twisting” in the mountain ridges - a twisted ridgeline looks like the mountain has melted, which is unappealing for a chocolate mountain.
We export our heightmap:
And use the heightmap to displace a plane in 3dsmax:
We build the rest of the chocolate bar underneath, giving us our final mountain model:
Since this is the shape we want our final chocolate to have, we need to create a negative mold which produces this shape when cast with molten chocolate.
We start by placing the desired shape on a flat platform, with some spheres which we will use as fiducial markers to ensure perfect alignment with the other half of the mold:
The second half of the mold provides a flat base for the mold to rest on, and leaves enough of a gap to produce a flexible chocolate mold:
The two pieces fit together nicely (upside-down in these illustrations):
The two halves are easily printed:
We will need to use a food-grade silicone for our mold. Smooth-On is the go-to brand which offers a variety of suitable formulations. We will go with Smooth-Sil 960, their firmest food-grade option. It is likely firmer than necessary (a Shore durometer of 60A) but it offers negligible shrinkage and should retain the details we want for our mountain.
After pouring the silicone into the mold, we hold it together with elastic bands while it cures for 16 hours:
The finished mold:
Now the fun part, pouring the chocolate. We melt some dark chocolate wafers:
Pour it into the mold:
Tap out as many air bubbles as possible, and place it in the fridge to cool:
We release the cooled chocolate from the mold:
And now for the finishing touch, a gold foil wrapper:
There is a key ingredient missing in our improved Toblerone: nougat. There are two promising recipes which attempt to recreate the same mixture of chocolate and nougat as the original Toblerone. We plan to attempt this recipe at some point in the future
Using a lower Shore durometer silicone would make releasing the chocolate easier, 20A or 30A is likely sufficient for the purposes of a chocolate mold.
