Brown Sugar Molded Chocolate Sharks

I recently saw this post over on the Rise & Shine blog on how to make chocolate molds using brown sugar. I thought it would be fun to try out some chocolate sharks for Shark Week! This is a great way to try out molding your own chocolates because it's really inexpensive (you don't need to buy any molds, only brown sugar!).

To try this at home you will need:

Brown sugar (I used light brown sugar)
a container to hold your sugar
3-D objects to make your mold with (I used plastic sharks)
chocolate (if you want something more colorful, you could test out some colored candy melts)
a microwave safe container to melt your chocolate in

Start by packing your brown sugar evenly into a clean container. Then firmly press your 3-D objects into the sugar, about half way up the object, to create your mold.

Next, chop up your chocolate and put it in your microwave safe dish. Microwave the chocolate at 20 second intervals, stirring between each interval, until the chocolate is melted and smooth (for me this took about 1 minute for a 1/2 cup of chopped chocolate). Once your chocolate is melted, carefully pour it into your mold. I tapped mine on the counter to get rid of air bubbles and make sure the chocolate got down into the "fin" areas of my mold. If you have little helpers, you may want to get small squeeze bottles they can use to get the chocolate into the molds without too much mess.

I was unfortunate in the weather, as it was quite hot the day I did my chocolate molds (room temp was about 90 degrees, ick). As a result, I put my poured chocolates into the freezer to set up and this caused extra brown sugar to stick to the chocolate when I took them out of the mold. If you do this in cooler weather, the chocolate should harden back up on the counter just fine and remove much more cleanly. Either way, this is definitely a fun little craft, I'm thinking about using those alphabet shaped magnets to make some letters for a birthday cake sometime!