Duets

Duet \Du*et"\, n. [{Duetto.] (Mus.)
     A composition for two performers, whether vocal or
     instrumental. [1913 Webster]

I recently had the good fortune to create and perform a duet in chocolate with talented painter Cindy Rizza.

The venue was the New Hampshire Institute of Art’s Annual Preview Party, for which the NHIA had commissioned me to create bonbons. The idea was one that had been jiggling my neurons for several years;

	to create a “canvas” of shiny-topped bonbons and find a painter who would paint on it. In colored cocoa butter, of course. When the Institute acquired the building in which Dancing Lion Chocolate resides, the opportunity–and the artist–finally.
	I introduced Cindy to the fine necessity of food-service cleanliness, taught her how to warm the cocoa butter and keep it at the proper temperature (31.1C), and she painted a pretty slick Mona Lisa on a thin sheet of 55% couverture I’d created for practice.
	I had created two “canvases” for our artist: one was rectangular grouping of 6 x 8 1″ bonbons topped in gold-finished dark chocolate, the one was a roughly circular form of cylindrical bonbons topped in white chocolate.
	The event being for an art school, Cindy chose to replicate a few famous existing works; one faithfully, two not-so-much.
The finished work. Click the image to view it up close.

Photography by Virginia Earley