I finally printed around twenty posters on tracing paper, one on dark paper, one on thick acetate and couple on cartridge paper. They all smelled wonderful, not anymore after a year, they smell like chocolate easter eggs that you find a year later, hidden in some unexplored part of the garden. You have to hold it very very carefully and not too long, otherwise the heat of the hands will melt it. I really like the idea of ephemera print, and I would have like to push further the idea of edible print and edible literature that you have to keep in your fridge.

Printing with chocolate is as simple as printing with ink strangely. The chocolate has more or less the same texture as the ink once the paste is added. And if it dries on the mesh you just have to heat it again with the hair dryer, and print again and again. The most difficult is not to print, it is to preserve and store the printed posters... I printed them on the hottest day of the month, the sunniest as well, and if it was very nice to have a chocolate smelly studio, it was a total nightmare to make the chocolate drying. 

The idea of this poster came up during a crit, Paulus our tutor suggested that as I was working about the relation between food and type, I should actually print text with food. We laugh, and then the idea started to grow stronger. I was already printing a lot, and I thought that there was not much difference between ink and melted chocolate. It was during easter holidays, and everyone was going back home to their country, so I ask my friends to bring me one chocolate bar from their local supermarket. I ended up with chocolate from Greece, Italy, Poland, Switzerland, Belgium, France, England and Spain. I then composed a A1 poster with the front and back of every chocolate bar, copied down all their different ingredient and percentage of cocoa. I melted some of the darkest chocolate to prepare the ink and just walked in the silk-screen studio, more or less sure that it would work.

Unfortunately, the silk-screen studio was closed today, so I couldn't take any pictures, except from the outside... The quality is so poor, that I will not post them. However, I am now posting pictures of the work I was printing the past year. I was working about the chocolate communication and the relation between cooking and designing. I always considered that designing was like cooking, a little bit of this, a little more of that, approaching the perfect balance between the element of a layout after many try, as a chef would do with a recipe. Starting from this idea, I realized a silk-screen poster printed with melted chocolate instead of ink. Manipulating the unctuous chocolate, checking the right temperature, observing the thin layer cooling down on the paper, like an anxious pastry chef with his creation.

Thanks to Zhivko, this blog is finally working. I should be able by tomorrow to take pictures of the work I have been printing since September and before.