Forget mock meat — this is choc meat.
A UK mom has “been accused of inciting cannibalism” after creating chocolate brains, hearts, fingers and other organs that are so realistic they could be props on “Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story.” Photos of her anatomically correct confections are grossing out gawkers across social media.
“I’ve always been into quirky things,” chocolatier Sarah Hardy, 52, told Jam Press of her faux-offal creations, which she frequently shares to her nearly 19,000 followers on Instagram. “The things I make inspire love or disgust, rather than anything in between.”
The Suffolk, England-based food sculptor started creating “choc meat” last year and now runs her very own Edible Museum full of naturalistic cocoa-based bonbons. Departments range from anatomy to zoology. Think: Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory meets Buffalo Bill’s basement from “Silence of the Lambs.”
“The idea [for the museum] was to make crazy-ass pieces of food art available to a wider audience,” explained Hardy, who was inspired by her previous career sculpting wax for historical museums.
Some of her grisly brainchildren include “Hannibal”-worthy chocolate brains, fingers and other naturalistic viscera. Hardy’s gruesome magnum opus? A blood-covered heart seemingly ripped from “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.”
“The human heart is probably my all-time favorite chocolate,” fawned the macabre Michelangelo. “I love the way it plays on a traditional confectionery heart, and it’s so fleshy, yet solid.”
Hardy’s work isn’t limited to candy-based body art. She also creates shiver-inducing chocolate toads, beetles and other strikingly lifelike critters.
Needless to say, many were horrified by the candy maven’s creations, with one aghast Instagram user writing: “This is so Hannibal Lecter. Now pass me the Chianti.”
Hardy claimed that she’s even been accused of promoting people-eating: “I have been accused of inciting cannibalism, told I should be ashamed of myself and have [been] constantly told my work is disgusting.”
But not everyone is put off by her ghoulish gastronomy. “These look so cool,” one fan commented on a video compilation of her chocolate concoctions.
Another wrote, “Cool, I love it, but for me it’s normal as I’m a chef de cuisine. Your work is great.”
Hardy even allegedly received props from the medical community. “I’m a lab tech, cancer research,” exclaimed one impressed viewer. “With a definite sweet tooth, but seriously, everything you make looks too good to ‘destroy/devour’ works of art!”
Indeed, creating these graphic sweets is an “exact process” that can take weeks or months depending on the details.
“There are a lot of stages to getting the first chocolate – from research to sculpting and various casting and mold-making processes, and then you start to make the chocolate,” explained Hardy. She outlined the process of making a chocolate heart in an Instagram video, describing how she bought a beef heart at a butcher shop and sketched it on paper before re-creating it in chocolate.
Hardy claims that she doesn’t purchase molds. “After creating the molds, the casting in chocolate is done by hand, and we use different types of chocolate inside the one mold to get visual effects,” the delicacy da Vinci explains.
Then, like for an edible airplane model, the epicurean artist painstakingly paints each mold with “cocoa butter colors” using techniques ranging from brushing to rolling and splattering. They’re even packed and labeled by hand.
“Odd, quirky people need stuff that suits them, and I’m happy to cater for those wonderful, interesting people!” Hardy said.