Booze Filled Chocolate Santa Heads

You totally read the title right!

Thought I'd share this one for any of you who are looking for something extra special to make for that person who has everything. I made some booze filled chocolate Santa heads using a mold  made from the Retro Santa created for this December's issue of PolymerCafe magazine. I couldn't resist making a copy of the Santa head before I painted and assembled the piece. I used a food grade mold putty so I can totally use it to cast chocolate. It's also bake-able..... wonder if there are some Santa head cookies in my future?

This is the original sculpt. He's made from STAEDTLER Fimo. I heat cured the piece and cooled it before I made the mold from Easy Mold silicone putty. Easy mold is a bake-able food grade flexible mold builder. It's a two part putty, and very easy to use. I have a tutorial here if you're interested.

This is the inside of the finished mold. Loads of retained detail. I'm pretty impressed with this stuff.

I washed out the mold with soapy warm water and dried it completely. Then I melted up some melting chocolate in blue, pink, red and white. I used a tiny glass bowl for each colour and microwaved each colour as I needed it for 20 second bursts. I used a tiny food grade paintbrush to paint in the details. I started with the eye colour first, then moved on to the hair and eyebrows. Next I coloured the mouth in red and then added pink to the face. I set the piece in the freezer for five minutes between each colour addition to firm up the chocolate so the colours wouldn't run.

After I had all the coloured chocolate where I wanted it, I cooled the piece until it was firm again and coated the whole inside of the mold with white chocolate. I gave it a good thick coat and chilled it again.

I mixed up some milk chocolate and mint chocolate with a bit of condensed milk and some Irish Cream liquor. I melted this all together and put it in the middle of the head then I added a candied cherry leaving about 1/2cm head space to seal the piece.

After cooling the piece again. I poured enough white chocolate over the whole thing to seal the back. Make sure there isn't any cherry juice floating around on top there. It will cause the seal to fail and the back will fall off.

I cooled the whole thing again for about ten minutes and popped it right out of the mold. I used a paring knife to clean up the back edges a bit, then I sealed him up in a cookie bag with a bow. 

I'm keeping them in the fridge until I can hand them out. Hope I don't accidentally eat them all.