The Outer Limits of Chocolate Art

Have you ever eaten a giraffe?

Of course not!

“Never ever in my life have I eaten a giraffe!”, you may well protest. Nor have I, despite my non-vegetarian ways.

But would it change your mind if the giraffe were to be made of chocolate?

Thought so.

Chocolate sculpture: a life-size chocolate giraffe

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a chef in possession of a kitchen, must be in want of a mania. Or something like that. ^[1]

Not to disappoint this expectation, via BoingBoing comes news (regrettably on Instagram) from chef Amaury Gichon, a chocolate sculptor. ^[2] Gichon is co-founder of The Pastry Academy in Las Vegas, Nevada in the US. The Bayesian posterior probability of silliness is of course much larger than the prior, given you know it’s Las Vegas, right?

Now, I love trompe l’œil food nonsense as well as the next guy. ^[3] But this 8.3ft (2.53m) tall chocolate giraffe is some next-level stuff. For one thing, “life-sized chocolate giraffe” is another of those phrases I never thought would be useful in actual practice. Yet, here we are.

Unlike nearly all of Instagram, the video is actually worth a quick watch if only to appreciate the excellence of his art.

For me, it’s a lot like watching the Olympics: while I am possibly the least sports-interested male in North America, the Olympics are interesting to watch people attempt perfection. ^[4]

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Notes & References

1: G Nunberg, “The Enduring Legacy Of Jane Austen’s ‘Truth Universally Acknowledged’”, Fresh Air (NPR), 2017-Jul-25. ↩

2: D Nealy, “Check out this edible giraffe”, BoingBoing, 2022-May-24. ↩

3: Ok, maybe a little more. But I’ll hide that admission down here in the footnotes to guarantee not a single soul will ever read it. ↩

4: The dark side of me thinks there has to be a Trojan horse version of this. They wheel in the chocolate giraffe, but during the applause Odysseus breaks out and murders everyone with automatic weapons fitted out with high-capacity magazines.

Something in the news about that recently. Except sadder in real life. And enraging that Republicans make sure it keeps happening. Welcome to minority rule. ↩