Wall-E Egg

This has been my life for the last two weeks.

Every year, at my work, we have the option to decorate a giant chocolate egg to be displayed somewhere in the hotel. Usually, it was in the restaurants, but last year, the management made them more accessible by putting them in the lobby.

So this was my egg.

I don't need to tell you how much I really, really love Wall•E. It was a beautifully executed, heartfelt, and well-told story that influenced me a great deal, so when I first began to nurse ideas for an egg of my very own around this time last year, I knew it would have to be Wall•E, and I knew it had to be this scene.

Most of this is edible, but there are non-edible materials inside the cube of garbage, and underneath the "water" in the egg, because solid chocolate would be A) freaking expensive and B) freaking heavy. It was my first time working with modeling chocolate (I have really hot hands, and I hate it), my first time working with an airbrush, and my first time painting with cocoa butter, which is where alllll the color comes from. Everything was hand-painted by me, some of it after a 5-hour Energy shot, so it's really miraculous none of it looks like a seismograph reading.

Wall•E himself gave me so much trouble. I started out sculpting him from modeling chocolate, but my hands kept melting him as I worked him, so I cast two sets of molds on two separate tries, only to go back to the modeling chocolate after more failed attempts than I care to recall.

Eve's shopping cart was my other humongous headache, because it was so frail and so brittle. I tried several different methods with a couple of different mediums, and wound up going with pastillage, which I wish I hadn't done, because it wound up being the cause of neurotic breakdown #3. It is patched approximately a hundred million times with chocolate, and painted over with silver luster dust.

Also, I know that Wall•E was paddling with a traffic sign, but I couldn't recall which one, so I improvised, and learned that yellow speed postings are advisories, and not hard, fast limits. The more you know.

I'm pleased with how this turned out, but even more pleased that it's just done. I've logged so much overtime over this thing, and I've spent so much of my own money buying components for it, and worked on it at home on my own time (of my own volition, not the chef's at all), lost so much sleep over it, etc., so I'm really just happy that I get my life back now. I learned a lot, and there's much I would do differently, and I am under no illusions that it's perfect, but I know I can do better next time.

P.S. Chocolate freeze spray is the greatest thing in the history of ever.

Wall•E © Disney/Pixar.