Chocolate bars serve as a canvas for edible art
Laurie Lowy sat at a small table in the corner of Dancing Lion Chocolate in downtown Manchester, bent over a 3- by 5-inch bar of chocolate, painting a winter scene. She dipped the tip of her paintbrush into one of the pigments resting in a warm-water bath just off to her right. Carefully, but without stress, she painted an olive green line on the chocolate in front of her, marking out the top of a small triangle. Another dip of the brush led to another, slightly larger triangle just below it, then another below that. All of us have tried to draw or paint a pine tree like this at some point, but when Lowy did it, a realistic-looking tree appeared on the chocolate.
“My background is art,” she said. “I went to the Ringling School of Art in Sarasota, Florida, but I’m here for a week on vacation, and I’ve been put to work.” Lowy is the mother of master chocolatier Richard Tango-Lowy, the owner of Dancing Lion. “I am painting chocolates here,” she said, “but I live in Florida.”
She looked up, smiled, switched brushes, then started to fill in her tree with a different shade of green. The brush put color on the chocolate less smoothly, adding texture to the tree.
“I mostly do mosaics now,” she said, “tables, backsplashes, that sort of thing. But these, for me, these are just fun. I mean, it’s creative, but it makes me pull for myself.”
One of the advantages to being the boss’s mother, she said, is a large amount of creative freedom. The chocolate bars she was working on this morning were all winter landscapes — one with a tiny, red-coated figure pulling a sled — but that was what she was in the mood for. “[I paint] whatever I choose to do,” she said. “When Richard and I talked before I got here, he said, ‘All right, Mom, what’s it going to be?’ And I said, ‘I think I’m doing trees.’ So that’s it; every single one of them I’ve done this time have had trees of some sort.”
Lowy switched brushes again, picking up one with a wider head, dipping it in white pigment, and started surrounding her tree with snow and dimpling the surface of the tree with small blobs of white. She cleaned the brush off, then dipped it into a completely different pigment, a muted gold color. With quick, smooth movements, she put gold highlights on the snow, and suddenly the scene was three-dimensional, and the light was the way it is on a late winter afternoon.
Lowy pointed to the jars of pigment in the water bath next to her. Although it makes sense to call what she does “chocolate painting,” she said, she doesn’t actually use paint. “It’s melted cocoa butter,” she said. Because it is a component of chocolate, it bonds easily to a chocolate bar, and is completely edible. “This,” she said, indicating the electric water bath, “keeps all these very melted. Because it’s chocolate. So, as soon as I turn this off, these harden, and then I can’t use them at all.”
She added some light gray tones to the snow in her tiny painting, and suddenly, there were snowbanks.
“The last time I did this — which was probably four years ago — we took pictures all over town,” Lowy said, reaching for a broad, feathered brush. “And I did pictures of buildings. It was very cool. But this time, I just wanted to go back to nature.”
Because Dancing Lion does not make chocolates from precise recipes, each batch is slightly different from any other, so each of these hand-painted chocolate bars is completely unique. “This is one-of-a-kind,” Lowy said. “A one-off. Every time I’m doing 12 and each one is entirely different.”
It’s hard to imagine someone actually eating one of these chocolate paintings, and Lowy said that sometimes people are reluctant to.
“That is a tendency,” she said. “But Richard always tries to explain, we create these things to eat.”
Chocolate art
Laurie Lowy’s hand-painted edible chocolate landscapes are available at Dancing Lion Chocolate (917 Elm St., Manchester, 625-4043, dancinglion.us/cacao) for $140 each.
