{"id":10860,"date":"2018-05-08T10:44:26","date_gmt":"2018-05-08T17:44:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chocolatebythebay.com\/magazine\/?p=10860"},"modified":"2024-10-14T14:07:28","modified_gmt":"2024-10-14T21:07:28","slug":"breaking-records","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chocolatebythebay.com\/magazine\/outsidechocolate\/chocolateroundtheworld\/breaking-records\/","title":{"rendered":"Breaking records"},"content":{"rendered":"

In recent chocolate news around the world, there\u2019s one for the record books and one that\u2019s music to the ears.<\/p>\n

A Casa do Chocolate<\/h2>\n

If people who live in glass houses shouldn\u2019t throw stones, then people who live in chocolate houses shouldn\u2019t… eat the furniture?<\/p>\n

\"2018
We should update the 3 Little Pigs to include a 4th whose house is made of chocolate<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The latest largest chocolate sculpture in the world, as certified by Guinness World Records, is\u00a0a house made\u00a0of chocolate bricks with melted chocolate as the mortar, plus all the accoutrements \u2014 even a couple of famous people \u2014 all sculpted out of chocolate.<\/p>\n

Made by Equipe da Casa do Chocolate, A casa do Chocolate<\/em>\u00a0resides at the\u00a0company\u2019s chocolate museum in Uberaba, Minas Gerais, Brazil.\u00a0The building is\u00a0about 8 ft. tall and took almost 12 tons of chocolate to make. Maybe most surprisingly it took\u00a0chocolatier chef Alex Bishop and his crew only\u00a013 days to build the house and everything inside.<\/p>\n

Maybe they cheated a little? They used silicon molds to create the sculptures of\u00a0Brazilian icons Ana Maria Braga and Chico Xavier \u2014 but even if it might be more accurate to describe them as molded instead of sculpted, it can\u2019t be easy to mold life-size recognizable replicas of people out of chocolate. And all of it, down to the dishes, was made in less than 2 weeks.<\/p>\n

I couldn\u2019t find a website for the company. They do have a Facebook page<\/a> \u2014 in Portuguese.<\/p>\n

Go big or go home<\/h2>\n

It seems that there\u2019s a tradition out there of breaking records for biggest building made of chocolate. Every year or 3, somebody breaks the record. The last record-holder was\u00a0Aficion Chocolate<\/a>\u00a0near Shanghai, China, who sculpted a building,\u00a014 feet long x 6-1\/2 ft. tall\u00a0out of\u00a011 tons of chocolate in 2015. I don\u2019t know what kind of building it is<\/a>, and I couldn\u2019t find any description online either. Maybe an old city hall? Or theater building?<\/p>\n

\"Aficion
Big, but not big enough anymore<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Receding further in time and size, the 2012 World Record building<\/a> was a replica of the Temple of Kukulkan pyramid in Chichen Itza, Mexico by Francois Mellet. The relatively small chocolate pyramid \u2014 only 10’x10’x6′ high ;-) \u2014 was set up at the the Qzina Institute of Chocolate & Pastry in Irvine, CA. And it was destroyed at the end of 2012 on the day the last Mayan calendar ended. (I assume that means it was eaten.)<\/p>\n

\"2012
2012 World Record Chocolate Temple didn\u2019t last long: It was destroyed at the end of the Mayan calendar, Dec. 21, 2012<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The previous 2 record holders in 2010 and 2009 were both created by\u00a0Mirco Della Vecchia<\/a>, an Italian chocolatier, who, together with a team of artists, created a white chocolate replica of the Dome of Milan and a\u00a0chocolate sculpture of the Dolomiti Mountains. They seem almost cute now in comparison to the trend of mega-sculptures.<\/p>\n

Music to the tastebuds<\/h2>\n

In other chocolate-as-object news, French artist Julia Drouhin is making\u00a0playable chocolate records<\/a>. She says that they are good for about 10 plays, by which time they have melted a bit and no longer sound like the recording. She also claims that they are edible.<\/p>\n

\"chocolate
This chocolate record looks a lot like I remember records looking like — just needs a label!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

She creates the molds for the chocolate records by pouring silicon over actual vinyl records. Then she pours chocolate into the molds, and after they dry, she\u00a0freezes the records to make them playable.<\/p>\n

The video of a chocolate record playing<\/a> Canto-pop sounds similar to what old records sound like, softer and muddier than digital music, but maybe the record had already been played a bit and was melting. Julia didn\u2019t start with the idea of chocolate as the medium, but she said that she wanted something ephemeral, that would disappear as it played.<\/p>\n

Chocolate turned out to be just the ticket: \u201cIt\u2019s close to the wax that makes the cylinder, which is the ancestor of the record,\u201d she told the South China Morning Post<\/a>.<\/p>\n

After it\u2019s melted too much to play anymore, you can eat it. However, if it is waxy like an old \u00a0phonograph cylinder<\/a>, I think I’ll pass.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If people who live in glass houses shouldn\u2019t throw stones, then people who live in chocolate houses shouldn\u2019t… eat the furniture?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11074,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,49],"tags":[945,60,944],"class_list":["post-10860","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-chocolateroundtheworld","category-chocolate-news","tag-brazil","tag-china","tag-guinness-world-records"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chocolatebythebay.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10860","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chocolatebythebay.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chocolatebythebay.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chocolatebythebay.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chocolatebythebay.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10860"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/chocolatebythebay.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10860\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44442,"href":"https:\/\/chocolatebythebay.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10860\/revisions\/44442"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chocolatebythebay.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chocolatebythebay.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chocolatebythebay.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chocolatebythebay.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}