Mount Pearl baker melds chocolate and tech to make unique sweet treats
CBC
A Mount Pearl baker is stirring up chocolate and printing unique sweet treats — literally — with a helping hand from technology.
Over the buzz of a 3D printer, Jennifer Barrett, owner of Snow Owl Bakeshop, is busy with a spool of plastic she's about to use to create a mold for her creations.
She moves to a block of chocolate, with images of a Christmas tree, a stocking, a wrapped president and an owl in a scarf.
"This is the fun part," she said, before snapping the chocolate into four even pieces.
Barrett began using 3D printers to create custom chocolate designs for her clients. The printer creates the mold and Barrett pours in the melted chocolate. Then it's all set aside to cool.
"It's just a unique thing. You can't just go in a shop and buy it yourself," she said. "It would be very difficult to mass produce something like that on your own if you didn't have a background working in chocolate or have the tools to do it."
Going from a design concept to a piece of chocolate requires a number of steps, said Barrett.
First, she draws a design and then uses software to translate it into a digital image that the 3D printer can understand to make a mold.
"Because that isn't strong enough material to withstand the heat and pressure from the vacuum form machine, I made a silicone mold, which is a reverse image and then filled that with plaster," she said.
Her vacuum form machine then heats up a sheet of plastic that will create a form around the silicone mold. Once that's done, Barrett heads back to her kitchen and fills the new mold with chocolate.
It's a lot of steps to get the finished product. But, she said, she doesn't do it all at once.
"I break it all out and make a plan and I don't do it all in one day. It's the kind of thing that takes several days to do," said Barrett.
Barrett is a trained artist who also studied baking in Toronto. She has worked at a number of bakeries and a chocolate shop.
"This is kind of my way of using those two together," she said.
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