Mount Pearl baker melds chocolate and tech to make unique sweet treats
Jennifer Barrett uses a 3D printer to make custom orders for clients
A Mount Pearl baker is stirring up chocolate and printing unique sweet treats — literally — with a helping hand from technology.
Over the buzz of a 3D printer, Jennifer Barrett, owner of Snow Owl Bakeshop, is busy with a spool of plastic she's about to use to create a mold for her creations.
She moves to a block of chocolate, with images of a Christmas tree, a stocking, a wrapped president and an owl in a scarf.
"This is the fun part," she said, before snapping the chocolate into four even pieces.
Barrett began using 3D printers to create custom chocolate designs for her clients. The printer creates the mold and Barrett pours in the melted chocolate. Then it's all set aside to cool.
"It's just a unique thing. You can't just go in a shop and buy it yourself," she said. "It would be very difficult to mass produce something like that on your own if you didn't have a background working in chocolate or have the tools to do it."
How it works
Going from a design concept to a piece of chocolate requires a number of steps, said Barrett.
First, she draws a design and then uses software to translate it into a digital image that the 3D printer can understand to make a mold.
"Because that isn't strong enough material to withstand the heat and pressure from the vacuum form machine, I made a silicone mold, which is a reverse image and then filled that with plaster," she said.
Her vacuum form machine then heats up a sheet of plastic that will create a form around the silicone mold. Once that's done, Barrett heads back to her kitchen and fills the new mold with chocolate.
It's a lot of steps to get the finished product. But, she said, she doesn't do it all at once.
"I break it all out and make a plan and I don't do it all in one day. It's the kind of thing that takes several days to do," said Barrett.
Mixing art with baking
Barrett is a trained artist who also studied baking in Toronto. She has worked at a number of bakeries and a chocolate shop.
"This is kind of my way of using those two together," she said.
It was only a few months ago when she decided to go all in on Snowy Owl Bakeshop. Her menu consists of sourdough, chocolates, caramels as well as truffles and a variety of pastries and cookies.
She's now at the St. John's Farmers' Market, but also has a presence on Facebook and Instagram, where she can take orders. One day, she said, she'd like to have her own shop.
Before using the 3D printer, Barrett said, she made clay sculptures and turned them into molds. Her basement office is filled with old casts for holiday chocolates, like smiling pumpkins, a grinning skull, a cheery ghost and birds.
It was when her partner bought a 3D printer that she saw it as another way to make her molds.
"It's quicker in some ways, but it comes with other challenges because the material is softer and I need to use silicone and plaster to translate that into a more sturdy molds," Barrett said.
She started with "love birds," which feature puffins, crows, ducks and seagulls in the shape of hearts. Then a few months ago, Barrett was approached at the farmers' market and was asked if she could do custom orders.
"We went back and forth and then I was able to figure out the pricing based on how much she wanted and the timeline and things like that."
Download our free CBC News app to sign up for push alerts for CBC Newfoundland and Labrador. Sign up for our daily headlines newsletter here. Click here to visit our landing page.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
