Making the famous chocolate bar the way it ought to be
As a Christmas tradition each year, I consume my favorite 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 understood 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 I made an actual mountain chocolate bar?
I knew what I wanted: a pyramid-shaped chocolate, with sharply defined ridges. Pouring molten chocolate in a soft silicone chocolate mold was the ideal approach, allowing me to carefully peel away the mold after the chocolate had set. The soft silicone mold was created by pouring food-grade silicone into another master mold, which I designed and printed.
My process was:
Creating realistic 3D models of mountains is straightforward: starting from a realistic heightmap, simply extrude a 3D model. But where to get the realistic heightmap?
My first idea was to use real-life terrain, by exporting a heightmap of a mountain from Google Earth. However, after a lot of searching it was difficult to find a real-life mountain which conformed to a perfect pyramid. Instead, I created my own heightmap using terrain generation software. I had played with Terragen in the distant past, but World Creator was the current best-in-class.
Starting with a 2048x2048 resolution, with 1m per pixel precision, I played with parameters until I had a good starting point:
I applied the “Dunes” filter to get a more pyramidal shape:
Applying it a second time sharpened the features:
The “Ridged” filter finished the job:
After a lot of experimentation, I wanted to avoid “twisting” in the mountain ridges (a twisted ridgeline looks like the mountain has melted, which is unappealing for a chocolate mountain).
I exported the heightmap:
And used the heightmap to displace a plane in 3dsmax:
I modeled the rest of the chocolate bar underneath, producing the final mountain model:
Since this was the shape I wanted the final chocolate to have, I next designed a negative mold which could produce this shape when cast with molten chocolate.
I started by placing the desired shape on a flat platform, with spheres used 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 were printed:
I used a food-grade silicone for the mold. Smooth-On is the go-to brand which offers a variety of suitable formulations. I went 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 was able to retain the details of the mountain.
After pouring the silicone into the mold, I held it together with elastic bands while it cured for 16 hours:
The finished mold:
Now came the fun part, pouring the chocolate. I melted some dark chocolate wafers:
Poured the chocolate into the mold:
Tapped out as many air bubbles as possible, and placed it in the fridge to cool:
I released the cooled chocolate from the mold:
And for the finishing touch, wrapped the chocolate mountain in a gold foil wrapper:
There is a key ingredient missing in my improved Toblerone: nougat. There are two promising recipes which attempt to recreate the same mixture of chocolate and nougat as the original Toblerone. I plan to attempt this recipe at some point in the future. TODO: nougat
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.
