Chocolate Nest for a Cake

You ever came across a recipe and eventhough you followed all instructions thoroughly, the outcome was nowhere near the illustration? Recently I had this situation when I made a bird's nest of chocolate for a cake. It looked like a hair bun. In the following ible I will show you the original recipe and my experiments to find a better result. Have fun!

• 100grams rice noodles
• 70grams chocolate
• 2 bowls
• bain-marie
• cling wrap

Melt the chocolate in a bain-marie, break the rice noodles into smaller pieces and cover your 2 bowls with cling wrap. Since you stack them into each other to press the chocolate rice noodles into a nests shape, you only need to cover the top of 1 bowl and the bottom of the other bowl.

Add the rice noodles to the molten chocolate and stir until the chocolate coated all noodles. Then fill the bottom bowl and drag some noodles to the top to achieve a nest-like look. Stack the top bowl into the bottom bowl and put them into the fridge for an hour.

As you can see the nest is rather disappointing. Traces from folds of the cling wrap, the nest has rather thin edges with a thick bottom.

Lets check this procedure with different noodles. I picked buckwheat noodles because they are already brown and maybe don't need chocolate. The angel hair rice noodles are thinner and maybe produce a better nest. Since noodles stick to each other if you don't cook them with salt and press them into each other, I didn't need chocolate for this experiment.

After cooking the noodles I have put them into the moulds (bowls) and waited 1 hour to see the results.

The buckwheat noodles were also disappointing and without the dark brown colour.

The angel hair noodles were also mostly on the bottom of the nest.

To achieve a thinner bottom of the nest with a higher edge I turned the bowl upside down and started laying the noodles from the mid.

This time I used a brush to add the chocolate on both sides. Waited for it to dry and the result was exactly what I wanted.

For the cake I used the same recipe like in my Blossom Tart which was a finalist in the Flower Challenge.

As you can see I opted for fresh fruits instead of quail eggs when I served the cake. It was delicious and kids actually ate the nest. If its coated in chocolate they eat anything ..