Wishbone-shaped chocolate piece allows you to interact and play with the popular dessert!

With the playful, fun appeal of a fortune cookie, Wishoco is a wishbone-shaped piece of chocolate that kids and adults can play with before eating. The rules are simple. Two people grab one end of the wishbone each and snap it. The person with the bigger piece wins and their wish gets granted. The game was originally played with the wishbone found inside a chicken, although this chocolate variant is much more fun, guilt-free, and vegan-friendly!

Designer: Louis Richard Marschal

Wishoco brings an element of interactivity to chocolate in a way that’s comparable to how KitKat and Toblerone have their own signature designs and user experiences. However, there’s a game associated with the Wishoco which involves making a wish or even a bet. The winner is the person left with the larger chocolate piece!

An important aspect of the Wishoco is that it can only be made using tempered chocolate. Un-tempered chocolate won’t snap the way you expect a bone to snap, but will rather just softly break like a cookie. The Wishoco’s requirement aligns almost perfectly with dark chocolate, which snaps rather wonderfully well as compared to milk chocolate. Designer Louis Richard Marschal has, however, experimented with white chocolate too!

Vacuum-formed molds to make the Wishoco

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Iris van Herpen created a dress from cocoa beans inspired by Magnum Vegan ice cream

Chocolate is probably more universally liked than coffee, and it’s used as an ingredient in many more kinds of foods that go beyond desserts. Given that situation, it wouldn’t be a surprise if cocoa beans are in much greater demand than coffee beans, which is already quite a lot. Consequently, it also means that the byproducts of harvesting and using these cocoa beans could be exponentially greater than even the output of coffee bean grinds, creating both waste and opportunities. Admittedly, there might not be much use for cocoa bean husks as there is for coffee bean grinds, but it’s only a matter of thinking outside the box and utilizing the technologies already available today. They could, for example, serve as the raw materials that would become the fashion of tomorrow, like this magnificent dress that could have you breaking your diet and reaching for a chocolate ice cream bar.

Designer: Iris van Herpen

Haute couture luminary Iris van Herpen is known in the industry for two things. The first is her signature use of lines, contours, and forms inspired by or even mimicking the movement of plants. This dress that debuted at the Paris Couture Fashion Week definitely conjures up ideas of elegance and magnificence. The rich brown fabric looks as if it is flowing and unfurling with a gentle breeze, while the copper-coated embellishments are reminiscent of vines and plants and embrace trees and give them a sense of eerie majesty.

Van Herpen is also famed for her forward-thinking creativity, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in the fashion world with the help of technology. While 3D printing is becoming more accepted even in the fashion world, Van Herpen embraces it wholeheartedly to make the impossible possible, like, for example, using organic material and literally weaving them into her dresses. As you might have suspected by now, this particular dress uses cacao bean husks that end up becoming those intricate and delicate embellishments that give the Vegan Dress its unique character.

The haute couture vegan dress was commissioned by Magnum, the famed ice cream brand that has been pushing its vegan line of sweet treats into the limelight. As one of the world’s biggest users of cacao beans, the company has been looking for ways to reduce its negative impact on the environment and support a more sustainable, circular economy, particularly in the fashion industry that often produces so many wasted materials. Like turning those unusable husks into fashion items, for example.

In this particular case, the cocoa bean pods are transformed into a biopolymer material that is fit for 3D printing into different forms. Of course, printing a solid object is one thing, but turning it into something exquisitely luxurious requires more than just technical know-how and 3D printers. It requires a delicate touch and an exacting eye like that of Van Herpen, ensuring that the vision of a sustainable future for fashion is easily translated from the sketch to the catwalk.

For its part, the Magnum Haute Couture Vegan Dress is just the first step in the brand’s newfound mission to create circularity in fashion. It is also partnering with the University of Leeds’ Institute of Textiles and Color to research more ways to create sustainable fashion from the biggest waste it generates. In the future, it might even be possible to turn these husks into the very fabrics and threads that will be used for couture creations and, just maybe, even be used for regular people’s clothes as well.

The post Iris van Herpen created a dress from cocoa beans inspired by Magnum Vegan ice cream first appeared on Yanko Design.

Giant Realistic Squid Made Entirely Out of Chocolate

They say, “dream it, and you can achieve it” (especially if you have some degree of advanced skill.) With that in mind, chef Amaury Guichon of the Pastry Academy in Las Vegas went and constructed a surprisingly realistic squid entirely out of edible chocolate. How about that! Save a choco-tentacle for me, chef.

The sculpture includes a giant anchor and chain (also made entirely of chocolate) that the squid appears to be tugging, presumably pulling an unfortunate ship down to Davy Jones’ locker. Definitely not how I want to go – I’d much rather drown trying to drink my way out of Willy Wonka’s chocolate river.

Equally as impressive as the sculpture are those chocolate machines Amaury uses that appear to dispense liquid chocolate with just the push of a button. I don’t know about you, but I need one of those. And if you think I didn’t just haul my refrigerator to the curb so I can install one in its place, well, you’ve seriously underestimated my sweet teeth. That’s right, not just one – they’re ALL sweet.

[via Laughing Squid]

This Giant Chocolate Bar Is the Sign for a Japanese Chocolate Factory

I’m currently on a low-carb and low-sugar diet, but I’ve been craving chocolates lately. And now that I’ve seen what is likely the largest chocolate bar on the planet, I really need a sugar fix. This gigantic chocolate bar is the facade of the Meiji Confectionery factory in Osaka, Japan. It measures roughly 544 feet wide and 91 feet tall, and holds the Guinness World Record for the largest advertising board made of plastic. I guess if they made it from chocolate it would quickly melt in the sun. I remember the time I left a Hershey’s bar in the glove box of my car. It wasn’t pretty.

The chocolate bar was installed back in 2011 but is not widely known as a tourist attraction to visitors outside of Japan. The massive sweet treat welcomes visitors to the factory and tempts them as they enter the building. I bet it smells like delicious warm chocolate outside this place too.

The wall of chocolate looks delicious, and if it were really edible, I’d break off a square and get to work on my snack fix for the month. If you need proof that this isn’t a Photoshop job, check out the Google Street View of the giant chocolate bar. You can also see how they assembled the display piece-by-piece in the video below:

Normally, the Meiji factory is open to the public for tours, but after the pandemic hit, they restricted access only to school groups and only those who reserve in advance. In the meantime, if you’re craving some Meiji chocolate, Amazon has a large selection (affiliate link) of these Japanese candies. I need to get myself a box of those Hello Panda cookies right now. Oh well, there goes my diet.


[via That’s It, I’m Architecture Shaming]

Solar System Chocolate Truffle Set Looks Out of This World

Crafted by Martin’s Chocolatier of the UK, this $20 Chocolate Planets gift set (affiliate link) includes nine different chocolate truffles, each representing a planet in our solar system, plus the Sun. Personally, I would have forgone the Sun and included Pluto instead, but they surprisingly didn’t ask my opinion before bringing the product to market. I’m as shocked and outraged as you are. Planetary lollipops more your cup of tea? No worries, those exist too.

Each planet is a different flavored truffle, including orange cream, chili/cherry ganache, peach cream, praline cream, caramel salt, praline, mocha cream, blueberry ganache, and toffee caramel. Obviously, I’m going to refrain from making jokes about the flavor of Uranus, because, as my wife often utters (while rolling her eyes) in front of friends after I’ve said something entirely inappropriate, “Oh grow up, will you?”

At nearly $2 per planet, I’d almost feel bad eating them. Almost. Then I’d eat them all in one sitting, barely pausing to notice the flavors because that’s just the sort of devourer of worlds that I am – one without any self-control.

[via DudeIWantThat]

Beauty Is in the Eye(s) of this Beholder Cake

There are some pretty creepy monsters in the world of Dungeons & Dragons, but I think the Beholder is the one that gets me the most. Between its lumpy body, big cyclops eye, pointy teeth, and eyeball tentacles, it’s definitely nightmare fuel. You wanna know one way to defeat a Beholder? Slice it up and stuff it in your belly! That’s finally an option now that the Beholder is in cake form.

Natalie of Sideserf Cake Studio makes some pretty amazing pastries, and this one is no exception. This edible sphere of many eyes is filled with all kinds of magic, including a moist yellow cake spell and a sugary green buttercream spell. She wrapped the cake in colored modeling chocolate and then sculpted all of the details from the pliable and edible material. She made the eyestalks out of food-safe wire and covered them with modeling chocolate too. After that, she got to work painting the blobby, hovering monster with food coloring. To finish the look, she added wet and shiny bits using clear piping gel.

Natalie made the cake for one of her Patreon supporters who loves to play D&D with her husband. You can check out how she created this creepy and sweet treat in the video below:

That part when sculpted and painted the insides of the creature’s mouth before putting in its teeth was particularly gnarly. Also, I would want to eat those teeth one at a time as a snack because I’m the kind of guy who bites the head off the chocolate bunny candies at easter.

[via Born in Space]

The Chocolate Cubes Keyboard Looks Good Enough to Eat

Do you love chocolate? How about computers? Well if you enjoy both, I don’t recommend getting chocolate all over your keyboard, as it’s really hard to clean off. Instead, why not go for this keyboard that looks like chocolate instead?

The Ajazz Chocolate Cubes is a full-size mechanical keyboard that looks absolutely delectable. The two-tone chocolate brown keys really do remind me of the bricks you break off from a chocolate bar… or if you’re like me, you just bite right into the whole thing. That said, I don’t think biting into this tasty looking keyboard is a good idea, despite the fact that it has equally yummy sounding Cherry MX switches. Mmmm. Chocolate-covered cherries.

Now that you’ve cleaned up the drool off your old keyboard, here are some additional specifics: It’s got 104 keys, including numerics and function keys, and is compatible with Windows or OSX. Each key switch is rated for over 50 million lifetime presses, and you’ve got a choice between Cherry MX Black, Brown, Red, or Blue keys. I say you stick with the brown ones to keep the chocolate theme going.

If you’d like a Chocolate Cubes keyboard for your desktop, head over to Drop today, where they have them on special for $95 through 11/17/19 – a savings of $15 off of the regular price.

IKEA’s making flat-pack DIY chocolate Easter bunnies!

An unusual play for IKEA, the Vårkänsla is an edible Chocolate Bunny right in time for Easter celebrations… but just like most of IKEA’s products, this bunny needs assembly too! The Vårkänsla is a flat-packed tempered chocolate bunny that can be assembled by just plugging three chocolate pieces together. Its design plays on IKEA’s trademark self-assembly instructions and techniques. The bunny comes in a flat box, with instructions on how to put it together. Luckily unlike most IKEA furniture, the Vårkänsla doesn’t need technical expertise, power tools, or small metal screws and bolts. It just needs a little bit of willpower, and a fairly decent amount of love for chocolate!

Designer: IKEA

IKEA Wants You to Build Your Own Chocolate Easter Bunny

Even if you’ve never purchased any IKEA furniture, you know that all of it requires some assembly. Apparently, that also goes for their food items as well. This Easter, they’re even asking customers to assemble their own chocolate bunnies, with the VÅRKÄNSLA self-assembly milk chocolate bunny.

Unlike other more complicated IKEA projects, this one only requires three steps. Still, I bet some people will get stuck and need to do a Google search anyway to complete it. Why should it be any different from their furniture? IKEA says that it can be used as an Easter decoration, or eaten right away. No thanks, I don’t like my chocolate collecting dust.

The chocolate bunny weighs just 3 oz. and contains 30 percent cocoa, which is UTZ certified using sustainable farming standards and good conditions for workers. The VÅRKÄNSLA sells for $4.29, and is only available in stores. This bunny adds a new meaning to playing with your food.

[via Reddit via Mike Shouts]

New York Hotel Makes 20-Pound Hot Chocolate

Look at this giant ass cup of hot chocolate. Those little cups you see are normal sized mugs arrayed around it because it’s so massive it’s meant for sharing punch bowl style. I bet you can’t drink it all yourself, but you can try. It’s packed not only with hot and chocolaty liquid, but the gigantic drink also has cinnamon sticks, whipped cream and plenty of jumbo-size toasted marshmallows.

Along with all that tastiness, you can also add your favorite adult beverage to the mix. Maybe something minty, or some Bailey’s to round out the package? The giant drink is being made in celebration of National Hot Chocolate Day on January 31 (who knew that was a thing?)

You can order a giant cup at PHD Terrace at the Dream Midtown hotel in New York City. Bring friends to help drink the beast and to pay for it; the giant spiked cocoa will run you a whopping $375.

[via TrendHunter]