My friend Ted got married this weekend. It was super fun – great band, tons of food, and I got to see my ex-roommate/roommate for life, Alex. When Alex still lived with me, his girlfriend Lauren (who also lived with us by this time) found this random red silicone heart mold, that ended up being left with me. I used that mold to make some fancy looking chocolate hearts for Ted and his new wife, Deborah.

This doesn’t really require a recipe, but here’s how it went…

I did a trial run early in the week of Rice Krispie filled chocolate hearts, as I’ve never used silicone molds before and I wasn’t sure how they’d release. What I got out of the trial run was that you really don’t need to spray silicone molds with Pam, they release perfectly on their own. In fact, if anything the spray can mess up the surface of your chocolate by getting bubbles in it. I also tried using just chocolate for the shells in some, and chocolate with a bit of shortening to thin it in others, and didn’t notice a difference.

Frozen marshmallow - hard as a rock!

For the real deal, I started off by making a very thin cake. I made up a box of chocolate cake mix and poured a bit less than half onto a parchment lined baking sheet, and baked it for about 12 minutes, until it looked fairly cooked and sprung back when pressed lightly.

Someone's going to have a spare cake when all of this is over!

Once the cake had cooled, I put it in the freezer, and left it overnight.

To make the shell, I just melted up a bunch (at least 2 cups by the end, although I worked in smaller batches) of milk chocolate and a little bit of shortening, and painted it into the mold.

I painted on another two layers, freezing for 20 minutes or so between each one. After the first layer, you don’t want the chocolate you’re painting on to be super warm, or it will melt off the layers you’ve already got. Melt it to a useable consistency, and then let it cool back to almost room temperature before putting on the second and third coatings.

Getting chunky in there.

At this point I put the mold back in the freezer to wait with the cake, and made a half-batch of Martha Stewart’s Peanut Butter Buttercream. (It was delicious. Thumbs up.) I then took out the mold and put in a layer of frosting.

I broke chunks of cake as close to heart shaped as I could, put them in the mold, and then did second layers of frosting and cake.

My breaking-cake-into-heart-shaped-chunks skills may need a bit of work?

‘Painted’ them closed with more chocolate…

Getting messy...

And put them back in the freezer for a while. Half an hour later or so, the molds worked their magic.

So flexy!

I cut off the excess chocolate around the bases, and then put them back in the freezer while I melted (and then partially cooled) some white chocolate.

Then I just doodled away!

Couldn’t give them away without quality control…

Yay for layers! Also, yum!

Boxed them up…

And gave them to Ted.

This is Ted's happy face.

You can change these to fit your own tastes – dark chocolate, white chocolate, other flavors of cakes and frosting. This combo was a really tasty one, though! Oh, and if you need a silicone mold of your own, this one was from Wilton, and they seem to have ones appropriate for a few different holidays. Also stars. Stars are always appropriate.

So…congrats to Ted, and boy I can’t wait until he gets back to DC with all his new kitchen stuff for me to invite myself over to use!

❤