Whose idea was it to attempt the World’s Largest Chocolate Flower Bouquet? Well mine, it sounded like a great idea at time. Chocolate Flowers is something Savour Chocolate & Patisserie School excels at so this would be easy right?

The flower making part was a pleasure with Paul Kennedy’s expertise and our working dynamic, this process was flawless.  We decided on an Avatar inspired theme and F. Mayer Imports came on board sponsoring the event with Callebaut. We had a venue and a fantastic event with The Cake Bake & Sweet Show.

Everything looked great, and then we thought about the logistics. How do we transport 200kg of delicately made flowers the five kilometres from Savour in Brunswick to the Cake Bake & Sweet Show at the Melbourne Exhibition Centre?  For the Guinness record all the flowers had to be pre-made. So Paul and I started this painstaking flower making process six months ago recruiting Australian World Chocolate Master Rebecca Carins, my apprentice Jean Kirkland and Savour volunteers Janine Sang, Yuliana Sutanto, Maggy Wong, Jason Kwon and John Law.

Some of the flowers have taken up to 8 hours to create just one flower, with a total of 1,500 hours of combined labour to create all the flowers. We have created and designed new concepts in flowers, utilizing different shaped petals, bases and stamens, with no two flowers the same.

The record was based on weight so each flower had a solid chocolate base to try and build up the weight criteria.   We start with a solid sphere or egg and then create and form the petals individually with a knife or spatula by dipping it into tempered chocolate and curve them before they fully set.

Once set we then dip each petal individually in tempered chocolate before attaching it to the base. Once the flower is complete we then colour the completed bloom with tempered and coloured cocoa butter often shading the flower with different colours.

Then we come back to transportation.

19 individual trips to the Melbourne Exhibition centre feeling every bump and poorly maintained road along the way. A few casualties but the majority of the flowers made it in one piece. Once the event was all over, we gave away all the chocolate flowers on display to the audience. How any of them managed to carry these extremely fragile flowers home in the 28 degree heat, I’ll never know!

The best part of this process is that Savour now has a whole botanical library of new flowers to incorporate into our hands-on chocolate flowers class at Savour Chocolate & Patisserie School or in our online classes. With events like this all the Savour staff put in that little bit extra, in particular Paul Kennedy. In the process we force ourselves to grow as pastry chefs and learn and adopt new techniques.

Here are the amazing facts and figures from the world record attempt:

• The final weight of Callebaut couverture chocolate used in the display was 308.133kg.
• The final length of the chocolate bouquet was 9 metres and the width was 1.8 metres.
• $6162.66 in Callebaut couverture was used to create the bouquet
• 131 individual chocolate flowers
• 9750 petals
• 82 chocolate twigs
• 33 Butterflies
• 2 ferns
• 7 bunches of reeds
• Over 100 leaves
• Total of 10 contributors
• 1,500 hours of combined labour