OUGD405 - Christmas Brief - Edible Type.

After receiving the brief I started mind-mapping ideas on what I could possibly create as edible type by the end of the week. 

As I had never baked anything before on my own in my lifetime, I decided to go with something I was familiar with and knew tasted good. I was stuck between banana bread and chocolate biscuit cake, as these are things I have at home. I ended up choosing chocolate biscuit cake, because I knew that the ingredients were simple and that It tasted good. Also I figured that it would be easy to sculpt letters out of a slab of flat chocolate.  

CHOCOLATE BISCUIT CAKE

I asked my mother for the recipe and ingredients for the cake. She gave me the amount needed to create what we usually have at home and seeing as the cake could potentially be tasted by a whole class of people I wanted to double the amount. This also meant it would give me more space to work with, when carving a word or letter out afterwards. 

Recipe my mum gave me for chocolate biscuit cake: 

5oz/150g marg
2 tablespoons of golden syrup
1oz/25g cocoa powder
9oz/250g rich tea biscuits
large bar of cadburys dairy milk

I doubled all of the above approximately...

1. I placed rich tea biscuits inside of a plastic bag and crushed them. It would of been ideal to use a rolling pin. However there wasn't one available, so I used the back of a spoon.

Crushed biscuits.

2. I then put the marge into a saucepan with syrup.

3. I melted the marge in the saucepan.

4. After melting, I added the cocoa powder and then mixed it until it was smooth.

5. Then added the crushed biscuits into the mixture.

6. Spread the mixture inside the baking tray.

7. Broke up the chocolate into a bowl and then melted it using a microwave.

I made a mistake on my first attempt at trying to melt chocolate in the microwave. I somehow managed to burn it! - I learned my lesson and then carefully melted the chocolate in the microwave by checking it every 10 seconds and moving it around with a spoon, so none of it got burnt. I had fortunately bought more chocolate than I needed!

8. I then began spreading the chocolate on top of the mixture in the baking tray.

9. I placed the baking try in the fridge for the chocolate to cool and dry. After this I used a knife to cut out the letter 'E' in the cake. The letter is supposed to be from the word 'EAT'. If I had more of the mixture, I would of created the word.

This is the weakness with the edible type brief. I hadn't really thought of a creative concept or play on words for the actual type. I knew that one letter would be more effective on the whole than a word, with the chocolate biscuit cake, as there wouldn't not be enough space or that much chocolate to eat after cutting away the rest. The chocolate is usually cut in squares and rectangles, so I had to choose a sans serif type, as trying to do curves would be very hard and make the cake crumble or break up. 

Overall, I'd say that my edible type was a success, mainly because It was actually edible and tasted good. I was proud of myself for just managing to make a cake. Although it may of not been overly creative, I still managed to create a piece of edible type. Also the tutors said that it tasted good, whom I'm pretty sure ate it all as there was nothing left by the end of the day.