Homemade chocolate plaque

With Father's Day fast approaching, the littles have been asking what they can buy for Daddy.  We saw many ideas in shops and online but eventually opted for chocolate because, let's face it, everyone loves chocolate!  However, instead of heading to Hotel Chocolat and choosing a gift, I invited the children to get creative and make their very own Father's Day chocolate plaque for their very special Daddy.

We each chose our favourite chocolate and something we thought would go nicely with it.  Jasmine chose a lovely big slab of Milkybar, some edible butterflies and a packet of popping candy, Sonny chose Ivorian 70% cocoa dark chocolate (I know, I was surprised too) and a bag of marshmallows and, for me, it could only be Dairy Milk and vanilla fudge.  Heaven.

To make our chocolate placque, we used 200g of each chocolate, which we then melted in the microwave; stirring after every 30 second burst.  Jasmine also grated a small amount of her white chocolate, "for decoration".

I lined an old baking dish with greaseproof paper and asked the children to choose three pastry cutters - one to represent each of us.  After a small argument over what the word "represent" actually means, they chose a small circle for Sonny, a slightly larger one for Jasmine and a star for me.  I was quite chuffed by this until Jasmine pointed out that the only reason they had gone for the star was because "the huge circle didn't fit in the dish".  Excellent.

Next up, we filled our shapes with our chosen melted chocolate.  Jasmine and I used spoons, but I gave Sonny an icing piping bag containing his chocolate as I figured this would make slightly less mess.  Then we decorated our little chocolate islands before emptying the remainder of the chocolate into the dish and watching it surround our shapes.

"This bit represents Daddy," said Jasmine.

We left the dish in the fridge to chill for a couple of ours before removing the pastry cutters and returning to said fridge.  This is what the finished product looks like:

 

And this is what Jasmine and Sonny looked like when I left them alone with the chocolate for two minutes:

Little monsters!