Chocolate Crown of Thorns Tutorial

Easter Cake Decoration

Granny made us a yummy cheese cake for Good Friday and Alice and I were given the task of decorating it.  This is what we came up with;

Granny was really pleased with it, so she decided to make another two for the lunch on Easter Sunday.  It was such an easy cake topper to make, so I thought I would post a quick tutorial to share with you all.  However, we were a little short of time because everything (including the food shopping) had to be done on Easter Saturday, as on the Sunday both of our children were reading the bidding prayers.  Alice is still only at junior school and I'm not sure I would have wanted to read in a Mass with 200-300 present at such a young age.

Anyway, the point I am trying to make is that I didn't have time to take many photos.  Fortunately, it is such an easy decoration to make that it doesn't require lots of in-depth pictures!

How to make a chocolate Crown of Thorns

Gather up what you need.  For this simple decoration, it's just three items; Greaseproof paper (parchment), chocolate sticks and chocolate glue!

We used our local supermarket's own brand of chocolate sticks, but they are basically that old throwback from the eighties 'Matchmakers'.  I know some people suggest using pretzels or bread-sticks, but these would take a lot of chocolate to cover them and involve much more mess and time.  

The first step is to draw a circle on your parchment paper, just a little smaller than the cake you wish to decorate.

You now need to melt some chocolate and using dabs of this as your 'glue' simply build up your 'sticks' into a  crown shape.  Here is our first layer;

Now continue in the same vein, breaking the odd stick into smaller pieces and placing at 'thorn-like' angles until you have something which looks like this;

Leave until set and then peel off the paper - I was surprised how 'solid' it felt.

Now place on cake;

The whole thing took less than twenty minutes, in fact producing and printing Jesus' 'Notice of Accusation' took longer.

A less religious variation would be a smaller ring with chocolate eggs in the middle as a cute Easter nest!