Unofficial Round 3 wrote:
At your disposal are some of the brightest colored ingredients we were able to source for the competition. While admittedly some of them may not stay that way depending on how you prepare them, we hope that they provide some inspiration for some of your most festive fare!
Use at least THREE of the following ingredients in your entry:
HeartRed Croaker Leg / Coneflower Cotton Candy / Nogglebane Leaf Beetle / Carnival Angelfish
Use at least THREE of the following ingredients in your entry:
HeartRed Croaker Leg / Coneflower Cotton Candy / Nogglebane Leaf Beetle / Carnival Angelfish
By the time Team Doubles got to their officially-unused-workstation, Skidatel snacking on her seasoned stuffed applecone, they found Casban already there. Surrounded by ingredients being levitated around, she was melting down existing chocolate and making new chocolate and setting up moulds. Cake batters of several different kinds were in the oven baking in wide tins and on the bench in bowls, and there was already a long sheet of chocolate laid out.
Shrugging, the team decided to just go with it.
The coneflower cotton candy was split into two different preparations: one had the fairy floss turned into a caramel, and the other was used to make a sweet coneflower extract.
These were used to fill some of the colourful chocolates Casban was making.
Some Nogglebanes were ground up to form a colourful paste with some honeybees and used as more chocolate filling; others were coated with chocolate whole, or used as a topping on small chocolates with the shells exposed, and others still were broken up and scattered through some chocolate to give it a good insecty crunch.
Casban's various carved fruits were also coated in chocolate, and then she turned to making a sort of bowls-on-silts sculpture out of chocolate.
Skidatel continued making insect-containing chocolates of various flavours: plain honeybee, fire ant, fruit-and-cricket, leftover stinglashes chopped in with apple, caramel and insect-flour-crunch.
Angmar started making a spicy bittersweet chocolate sauce, and Yuch handled gutting some of the fish and preparing some croaker legs, as well as getting some more meats and fishes of differing colours to add some variety to the dish. The meats and fish were baked with the sauce and chilled to be placed in some of the bowls, alongside an array of chopped fruit and nuts.
Another of the bowls was filled with the insect chocolates - some of which had food colouring added and others of which had been painted with edible sweet paint.
After some thought, they decided to add some more meaty chocolates: chocolate-coated bacon, hummingbird paste with added honey used as a chocolate filling, croaker-and-coffee, leftover meaty cotton candy chopped fine and mixed through chocolate, and bone-marrow-chocolate.
They also did some citrus lionfish chocolates, cinnamon loach chocolates, and spicy feisty-lettuce and molten goby chocolates.
The ensuring branching tower topped with bowls, each filled with a different combination of chocolate-involving food, was on a flat 'table' made of more chocolate and filled with a multi-flavour cake filling, with the chocolate-coated carved fruits attached to it in a diorama (many were, after Casban's chocolate shaping, shaped like harpies).
Rows of white chocolate 'rocks' marked where each flavour of cake in the 'table' began and ended.
Some of the 'rooms' of the tower were filled with various fillings also used in the small chocolates filling the bowls, leaning towards the herbivorous side.
The savoury dish - bright red croaker legs, colourful carnival fish, toasted nuts, baked fruit, pink salmon, some white fish from some fishy cotton candy, brown seared steak strips, and pale chicken, all with a spicy bittersweet chocolate sauce - was in a large middle bowl surrounded on three sides by the bases of the towers. The bowl was itself made of chocolate, painted with edible food colouring with Wind flight decals.
Each of the bowls and tower-segments were colour-coded with which food groups they contained.
Yeah there's no way they won't be spotted by the organizers. They're technically not supposed to be doing this.
EDIT: changed a bit of what Casban had done with the cake and made it clear that the cake is 100% Casban's fault