Admittedly, we were first seduced by Sweeteeth’s irreverent packaging for their “Call of the Wild” port wine caramel chocolate bar, but once unwrapped it became immediately clear that the contents inside were also worth a healthy…
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Découverte du studio de création Choco Toy basé à Caracas et dirigé par les designers Luis Alfonso Albornoz et Karen Guevara. Illustrant avec panache et originalité le nom et l’identité « Choco Toy », voici ce superbe travail typographique et très coloré en images dans la suite de l’article.
We ate and drank the best of 2012 and plan to do the same in 2013. This is the heyday of the gourmand, with everyone everywhere experimenting with ingredients and looking to explore the final reaches of the food-obsessed revolution. Below you’ll find pairings of our favorite food and drink…
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As soon as you walk into Compartes in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, you’re hit with the intoxicating smell of chocolate from handmade, tattoo-topped truffles, chocolate-dipped fruit and a new line of bars. The recently redesigned space—sleek and mostly black—provides a sophisticated backdrop for the colorful sweets, and…
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In addressing the challenge of producing a Kentucky bourbon whiskey in Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood, Cacao Prieto distillery looked to the Widow Jane Mine in Rosendale, NY. Heavy in minerals and naturally filtered through limestone, the water makes an uncanny pair with the aged spirit. The mine also provided…
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Chocolate appears to be dripping down the walls at this cafe in Opole, Poland, by interior designers Bro.Kat.
Located in the market square, the cafe only occupies a 30-square-metre unit but the designers have built a mezzanine to fit extra seating areas into the space.
“The chocolate melting on the walls is the only embellishment of the room,” said designers Roma Skuza and Bogna Polańska, before explaining that the “milk drops” hanging from the ceiling are lamps.
Black, brown and cream are the only shades used for furniture and decoration, reflecting the three main varieties of chocolate.
Ground floor plan – click above for larger image and key
A dark brown-coloured bar and kitchen are located beneath the mezzanine, which the designers refer to as ”a square of chocolate”.
Mezzanine plan – click above for larger image and key
We’ve featured a couple of spaces with chocolate-like decorations. See our earlier stories about a chocolatiers’s shop in Belgium another one in Japan.
See all our stories about chocolate »
Photography is by Radosław Kaźmierczak.
The post Chocolate Bar
by Bro.Kat appeared first on Dezeen.
London designer Paul Cocksedge has made a giant chocolate QR code that visitors to The Dock during the London Design Festival can scan to get a free gift (or you could just scan the image in the bottom of this story).
Cocksedge worked with Hotel Chocolat to create the installation as part of Designs on Chocolate, a project pairing five designers with five chocolatiers. Following a visit to the company’s factory, he decided to use nearly of their 1000 chocolates to make an interactive mosaic.
“I wanted to leave these beautiful pieces of chocolate as they were, instead of creating an object simply to be looked at, and so losing the whole idea of taste,” Cocksedge says. “The true art of the chocolatier appeals to your palate as well as your eyes, and through the process of placing these exquisite pieces in various patterns, the project started to grow.”
Scanning the QR code on a smartphone or tablet leads visitors to the Hotel Chocolat website where they are rewarded with a voucher, to be exchanged at the company’s flagship store in Covent Garden for a limited edition chocolate box that’s been specially made for the London Design Festival’s tenth anniversary.
“The idea is to create a pattern which is seemingly random but which, through the subtle introduction of technology, becomes something altogether new, the start of a journey,” explains Cocksedge.
Designs on Chocolate will be on display at The Dock, Portobello Dock, 344 Ladbroke Grove, London, W10 5BU until 23 September. Photographs are by Mark Cocksedge.
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If you’re in London but can’t make it to The Dock, Hotel Chocolat and Paul Cocksedge would like to share the experience with Dezeen readers, so you can scan the image above to claim your voucher.
While in Covent garden, pop into Dezeen Super Store at 38 Monmouth Street, Seven Dials, London WC2H 9EP where you can get 10% discount in store and enter our competition to win a designer watch worth £150 by downloading this flyer and presenting it at the shop.
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The map above is taken from Dezeen’s guide to the London Design Festival, which lists all the events going on across the city this week. We’ll be updating it over the coming days with extra information on our highlights so keep checking back. Explore the larger version of this map here.
The post Gift by Paul Cocksedge
for Hotel Chocolat appeared first on Dezeen.
Resourceful dads come up with crowd-pleasing organic chocolate bars
Certainly, there’s sugar everywhere. You may have a hankering for the traditional, mass-produced Mars bars and bionic sours on every corner, or wish to hold out for a more sophisticated free-trade 70% cacao gourmet morsel with enough antioxidants to be classified as a superfood. What about a little bit…
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Sweet Instagram and Polaroid shots re-imagined into edible chocolate
Cooking up quite an online stir in the last few weeks is Philadelphia’s Cocoagraph, makers of artisanal chocolates topped with vintage-filtered Instagram and Polaroid shots. The small start-up allows customers to pick and choose any photograph they may have floating around and turn it into a unique and edible keepsake with just one scan. Founder Rae Vittorelli made us a special batch—featuring our very own CH mascots Otis and Logan—so we could get a closer look at, and taste, the graphic treats.
While the image is what creates the buzz, the artisanal chocolate is equally important, and equally satisfying. Sourced from a small-batch, organic chocolatier in Santa Barbara, CA, each bar is available in two sizes in white, milk, dark and dark organic, with the addition of a subtle mint leaf flavored dark organic coming soon. Of the group, we preferred the dark organic for its crisp snap and slightly bitter but full flavor.
The new brand has a selection of chocolates available to purchase on their website, and are able to fulfill custom personal orders for weddings, personal and corporate events.
Thin layers are gradually shaved away from a cylindrical block of chocolate to reveal the embedded geometric patterns in this installation by Dutch designer Wieki Somers at the Vitra Design Museum (+ movie).
Somers worked with Swiss chocolatier Rafael Mutter to create the Chocolate Mill, which is adapted from a cheese-cutter.
A blade pivoting on the centre of the block is rotated to scrape back one layer at a time, making thin curly shavings to serve to visitors.
The slab is made up of smaller pieces of different types of chocolate, arranged so that new patterns emerge as the surface wears away.
A smaller version of the machine is available in the museum shop.
The project is on show until 1 September at the museum in Weil Am Rhein, Germany, as part of an exhibition called Confrontations that pairs designers working in the Netherlands with practitioners of traditional crafts in Switzerland.
Eindhoven-based duo Formafantasma are also included in Confrontations and worked with a traditional charcoal burner to make tap-water purifiers.
See more stories about chocolate »
See more stories about Wieki Somers »
Here’s some more information from Somers:
Against the background of the summer exhibition ‘Gerrit Rietveld – The Revolution of Space’, a special exhibition under the title ‘Confrontations’ opened during Art Basel at the Vitra Design Museum, dedicated to a number of innovative Dutch designers whose experimental methods are similar to Rietveld’s. The designers were invited to join a partner from the region in developing a design project. The spectrum of partners ranged from the molecular biology laboratory of the firm Roche to the only female charcoal maker in Switzerland.
Studio Wieki Somers teamed up with chocolatier Rafael Mutter to create the Chocolate Mill, a large cylindrical block of chocolate from which delicate rosettes can be shaved off with a crank-turned blade. Various patterns are integrated into the block using different types of chocolate, creating a flipbook effect as the layers are scraped off.
During their performance at June 15, Studio Wieki Somers and the chocolatier prepared chilled drinks for visitors using the chocolate rosettes. Small chocolate mills are on sale in the Vitra shop, including special chocolate for refilling.
Making chocolate out of cocoa beans is a labour-intensive process. But once transformed into chocolate mass, the possibilities seem endless. The fluid mass of chocolate solidifying into different forms is a fascinating process, how it can break and melt again. Nowadays production possibilities can produce new forms of chocolate bars and bonbons by printing, milling, extruding, dripping and spinning chocolate. Solidified sediments, left overs of these processes, can become new chocolates.
This is the first time we have worked with a material that has such a delicate and direct relationship with its consumer; chocolate stimulates all our senses and our brain at the same time. Nowadays we sometimes forget how astounding it is. It has been a long time since chocolate was a rare substance; a sacred drink, a medicine.
We wanted to inject a new excitement and enjoyment into chocolate by changing some rules and generating a new ritual: a new way of eating and sharing chocolate.
We have created a device, a chocolate carrousel, by adapting a machine used mainly in Switzerland as a cheese slicer. We use it in a different way, as an instrument that mediates between us and the chocolate. We also designed the chocolate which the machine processes, by inserting memories into it like fossils. Thus the three-dimensional aspect of the carrouselis extended by a fourth: time and history translated through movement. By rotating the carrousel’s arm, one image appears while another fades away.
There are two animations. The first is a couple spinning in a dance of never-ending pleasure: the carrousel’s handle turns like that on a music box. As another layer, we drew upon geometric patterns from Rafael Mutter’s bonbons: by turning the mill you witness a mysteriouskaleidoscopic effect in which African Bobo masks emerge (cocoa pickers believe they have a special power to bring a good harvest). The movement now refers to the magical history of chocolate.
In its new symbolic play, it reminds us of Marcel Duchamp’s chocolate grinder, one of the central motifs in his masterpiece, The Large Glass. This complex work has mechanical, symbolic, chemical and erotic associations. We do not intend to match such a broad spectrum of references, but take this device into account as an imprint in our collective subconscious. We want our machine to produce emotions. We want a machine that feels and tastes.
Eating the delicate flowers generated by this process will be a completely new experience of tasting chocolate. Unlike breaking a conventional chocolate bar, the material now becomes so fragile and generous. It is affluence and scarcity at the same time: slicing layers of pleasure.
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