You may think this is a post about people who love chocolate and you won’t be entirely wrong.  But this post is actually about making people – even people you love – into chocolate.  This is a very fun project and it gets great reactions from everyone.  There’s nothing like, for example, eating your sister’s face (or, so my son informs me).

This can work with any good quality chocolate.  Chocosphere is a great chocolate resource where you can get pretty much any chocolate made around the world.  I favor Guittard and Valrhona.  Guittard A’peels work well too.

1. Find a picture of your subject.
2. If you have the ability to crop pictures (Adobe Photoshop or Elements, for instance) you can get a nice close up a face.
3. Reduce the coloration so that you only have two-four colors.  In effect, posterizing the picture.
4. Size the cropped face to whatever dimensions you want your end product to be.  For my daugher (pictured), I made the image about 3″ square.
5. Replicate the face several times on a single sheet either by using Photoshop (create an empty 8″X11″ document and then copy the layer with your prepared image into it multiple times) or using a photocopy machine (cutting, pasting and copying to get as many as you wish)
6. Place the multi-image page on a half-sheet pan or other suitable (i.e., washable) surface.
7. Cover the page with plastic wrap.  Smooth it out as much as possible so you have no wrinkles.  You will be using the plastic wrap as the surface on which you build the face.
8. Prepare as many  parchment paper pastry cones as colors you will using.  (Pretty good instructions for this here.)  Do not cut a hole in the bottom yet.
9. Melt the darkest chocolate and fill one of the cones.  The easiest thing is to hold the cone in your non-dominant hand.  The parchment paper cone is pretty stiff so it should be easy to fill with a spoon or just pour from the container.
10. Cut a teensy-tinsy hole in the parchment cone.
11. Now the fun part: carefully outline the features with the melted chocolate.  If you find using the cone too cumbersome, you can use a fine watercolor brush.  Keep a pan of simmering water with a half-sheet on top so you can re-melt the chocolate on the brush.  Give the chocolate 5 minutes or so to harden a bit.
12. If you’re using more colors, do the next level of details.  Bear in mind you’re working in reverse.  The chocolate you put down first will be the color that’s in front.
13. Lastly, melt some white chocolate.  Since the white will be the background for the chocolate drawing you can either spoon it on and spread or use a parchment cone with a slightly larger hole cut.  Or a combination of both.
14. Let the chocolate harden for at least 10 minutes.  Gingerly touch it with a finger.  If it’s still soft…wait longer.
15. Now just peel your faces off the plastic!  You’ll be eating faces in no time now!

I will tell you that my daughter was delighted to be immortalized (or briefly rendered depending on how long you can hold off eating the face).  My sons are jealous and I’ve promised to do them too.  In fact, I can envision a whole chocolate family and then a weird face eating party of some sort.