Jan. 7-27

With the success of the New Year's Eve dinner in mind, I began to think about working to design something that wouldn't be a single-person dessert. One of the ideas I had been playing around with was that most desserts that are made for several people are destroyed when they are cut. The design of the completed dessert is then ruined. Consider a beautiful wedding cake. The intricate flowers and delicate piping are sliced arbitrarily into pieces for the crowd at the reception dinner. I believe that the design should somehow stay beautiful even as it is being enjoyed. I wanted to create a work that would remain a cohesive dessert as the parts of it were removed and eaten.

I also wanted to work with a new material and decided to explore chocolate. Having studied caramelized sugar all the of the previous semester, I was eager to introduce a new element I hadn't studied but that had interesting material properties of its own.

I wanted to create a modular chocolate puzzle that six to twelve people could enjoy. I liked the idea that these pieces would overlap and possibly interlock with each other. Here are my initial sketches as I worked out how to design this dessert: