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Toblerone Done Right - Chocolate Mountains

Making the famous chocolate bar the way it ought to be

The Idea

As an annual Christmas tradition, 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 9 lb version of the Toblerone bar:

But when it comes to “better,” the U.K. retailer Poundland understood the objective: Twin Peaks is its version of Toblerone with twice as many 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?

The Tools

The Process

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:

  1. Create a 3D model of the ideal mountain
  2. Design a silicone chocolate mold
  3. Design and 3D-print a master mold, then cast the silicone chocolate mold in it
  4. Make the chocolate mountain

1. Modeling the ideal chocolate mountain

Creating realistic 3D models of mountains is straightforward: start with a realistic heightmap and use it to displace a subdivided surface. 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 heightmap at a scale of 1m per pixel, 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 3ds Max:

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.

2. Designing and casting the silicone chocolate mold

I started by placing the desired shape on a flat platform, with spherical registration keys 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 (with a hardness of Shore A 60) 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:

3. Casting the chocolate mountain

Now came the fun part: pouring the chocolate. I melted some dark chocolate wafers:

I poured the chocolate into the mold:

I tapped out as many air bubbles as possible and placed the mold in the fridge to cool:

I released the cooled chocolate from the mold:

For the finishing touch, I wrapped the chocolate mountain in gold foil:

3.1 Planned Improvements

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 one of these recipes at some point in the future. TODO: nougat

Using a silicone with a lower Shore hardness would make releasing the chocolate easier; Shore A 20 or Shore A 30 is likely sufficient for the purposes of a chocolate mold.

The Result