Ever since seeing it on Cake Boss, I've been somewhat intimidated and intrigued by modeling chocolate. Anything that is so beautiful has to be hard to make, right? Fortunately for us, not so!

Materials and Ingredients

• Double boiler or glass bowl that fits above a saucepan
• Cookie sheet or large plate
• Plastic wrap
• 10 ounces of white chocolate chips (NOT Hershey's! For some reason, theirs just make the modeling chocolate crumble…)
• 1/3 cup corn syrup

Directions

1. Fill your sauce pan about 1/3 of the way—more or less depending on how low the bottom of your bowl sits. I don't know, but I'm pretty sure you don't want the bowl to touch the water. Bring to just-barely-bubbling.

2. Measure out 10 ounces of chocolate. It might be easier to scale the recipe up for an entire 12 ounce bag of chocolate chips, but eh. I like to measure the corn syrup now, as well, so that's one less thing to do later.

3. Melt the chocolate chips over the boiling water. I used my Pampered Chef spatula to stir, because I knew it could stand the heat and would be relative easy to clean. (Plus, I used it later to scoop out the rest of the corn syrup. Less things to wash is my favorite.) Be careful not to let the steam or condensation touch the chocolate because it will make the chocolate seize up! I don't know why it does, but if that happens you basically have to start over.

4. When the chocolate is melted (it doesn't even have to be completely melted—tiny chunks will melt as you stir) take it off the heat. You can add coloring at this point if you want—I will be making a bunch of different colored things, so I'm going to to add color as I go. Keep stirring until you're sure all the chunks are gone, but don't take too long (we don't want the chocolate to start to harden).

5. Stir in the corn syrup. It will look weird for a while, but after about 30-45 seconds it should turn into this solid-looking thing.

6. Put plastic wrap on the cookie sheet or plate, and then dump the chocolate onto the plastic. (Action shot!) Flatten it with your fingers until it's less than 1/2 inch thick. The chocolate is going to be really greasy-feeling at this point—especially if you used white chocolate—but that's OK.

7. Let the chocolate harden in the fridge for at least a couple hours. If you're not going to use it immediately, wrap it up or put it in a zippy bag, squeezing out the air. When you're ready to use it, the warmth from your hands should soften it to usable. Have fun!

(I used the leftover water in the pot to make my house smell nice! I added a little bit of orange extract and some ground cinnamon to the boiling water, turned the heat down to warm, and my kitchen smelled heavenly!)

In the next couple days, I'll be actually playing with the modeling chocolate, so I'll let you know how that goes!