War-zone chocolate brownies (edible decor)

Question

I have been tasked with creating war-zone brownies: should contain visual cues that the brownie is a conflict zone and have edible props.

My progress has been very slow. After a few days, I'm still at the drawing board. I've only ordered some cheap toothpick props to stick in to cultivate the war-zone atmosphere: ak 47s, flags, ect. The trouble is these are not edible and betray the spirit of the project. In other words, I will still need some edible things too.

My online queries found no shortage of fairy-dust, unicorns and a slew of other goody-two-shoes edible confectionery decorations, but virtually nothing in terms of the macho-man, war-zone edibles I'm after, leading me to conclude that a store-bought solution is unlikely. That leaves me with improvising edible props.

To keep things simple, and to keep this question within a reasonable scope, I'll simply limit the universe of answers to help find edible solutions to my checklist, which is short:

• Guns / gun-looking things (best I could do was pocky)
• Bullets
• Debris

Question

Given my needs and approximate aesthetic as described above, what edible solutions can I improvise to decorate my war-zone chocolate brownies? (note: answers should ideally pair well with the flavor chocolate).

Answer 1

First, pick a scale and more detailed theme:

• I'd go for battlefield scale, so a person would be an inch or two high (3-5cm). This means you can cast moulds from toys. A few soldiers might need to be made, not easy but they don't have to be great.
• Otherwise go for life size. Make each brownie the right proportions and shape, helped by fondant, for a rifle magazine, accompany with cast bullets. Or a cake shaped like a military helmet.
• I've assumed something like WW1 below, but much of it would hold for older battles (cannon would be simpler than some of what I've suggested, but horses would be too hard)

Then you can choose whether to present a full scene, or just individual servings with a suitable decoration.

Military Hardware

Chocolate tools (and other models made of chocolate) have become quite common recently. The link is to a video, but it's adequately summarised in text. Their method starts with taking a cast of real tools. If you can buy miniature weapons you can start from those, or full size (model or used) bullets. Note that the things you cast need to be fairly flat. Making moulds of toy tanks etc. should work, though the main gun would need to be added after casting (cylinders are fairly easy. Even failed attempts can be made into military debris.

Flags, maps etc.

You can get printed edible rice paper cake toppers. For common national flags you can probably buy it pre-printed, anything else might be a custom order. I had a couple of pages of my thesis printed like this for a cake to celebrate. Edible flagpoles can be made using sugarwork techniques. A little white food colouring powder will make them opaque.

Scenery and other fiddly things

Here are a few ideas:

• Marzipan or fondant (or modelling chocolate, but that tends to be brown or creamy white and doesn't take colour as well as the others) for:
  • Sandbags, perhaps making trenches (at your cut lines).
  • Troops (lying prone perhaps, or leaning against a trench wall)
  • Coloured grey or brick-red, hard fortifications (pillboxes)
• Dig out shell craters from the brownie itself
• Sugarwork with powder food colouring again for fences/barbed wire.
• Food colouring dust and lustre powder can give surface colour or a metallic sheen
• You can paint with concentrated food colouring. I'd start with the paste type, mixing with a bit of icing sugar and water as they'll be too strong to start with. There's also edible food paint.
• Chocolate suggests mud, fitting with my European theme. Desert scenery could be made from marzipan or coloured fondant, while lush greenery would need lots of coloured fondant

Answer 2

Consider using fondant toppings.

Fondant is a confectionery topping with a consistency similar to modelling clay. It should be possible to cut a sheet of it into shapes such as firearms, bombs, military vehicles, destroyed buildings, flags, et cetera, or to hand-mold it into appropriate shapes. It's often used on cakes, and it should work well enough on brownies as well.

I question the wisdom of doing so, since it might offend or hurt someone who has lost loved ones in a conflict zone, but I guess it might make sense if you're doing this baking on behalf of a military unit, or you're raising awareness about a current conflict zone as part of an anti-war campaign.

Answer 3

Tank trap barricades

These have a definite warzone vibe. How do you make them? Thin chocolate sticks. In the UK we have Matchmakers, but other places may have local equivalents. You could use thin biscuit sticks instead.

Cut these into suitably sized sticks, and assemble with a dab of melted chocolate in the middle. Three equal-sized sticks joined together creates a caltrop. Probably more convincingly scenic would be a barricade made of two or three X's joined with one cross-piece.

Barbed wire

Get some liquorice laces and silver edible glitter spray. Apply the latter to the former.

Blood

Raspberry sauce. Nuff said.

Answer 4

Chocolate. Lots and lots of chocolate.

Without the proper treatment, chocolate doesn't gloss. That's perfect if you want to have a matte, dirt-appearing surface. With such a matte black and brown mix, it should be easy to turn the surface of a brownie into no-mans-land. by laying down the chocolate in layers and keeping some areas much less covered, one can create bomb holes and trenches, which then can be reinforced with colored white chocolate sandbags, bunkers, and other entrenchments, turning this brownie into Flanders Fields.

In scale, I would actually go for the Z scale (1:200) as that massively reduces the need to actually put figures onto the picture, and instead one could use flags to indicate positions of units.

Answer 5

I don’t know how blatantly obvious you need to be about it, but the most simple thing that I can think of to represent a war zone is a barrier of some sort.

At first I was thinking mine fields and concertina wire, but then I realized that a wall might work

You could even just frost it so it’s two different colors

If you need something more obviously violent, frost it, bisturb the frosting, then add a tombstone. Or rows of tombstones, like a military cemetery

And as nick01200 mentioned, you may risk re-traumatizing people who have been in conflict zones, so please be careful how you use this

Answer 6

(Disclaimer: ChrisH had the idea of a beach/landing in a comment.)

Cookie crumb topping for sand and dirt. This will be tasty (better than fondant) and also have a lot of artistic potential, but also it will be a lot easier than icing.

You can use multiple colors of cookie to create cool effects like "wet" sand or layered dirt. And you can add footprints, tank tracks, tire tracks, etc.

For a beach, you can use a little bit of blue/white icing on one side to create water and some green/brown icing on the other side for the land side, maybe with bigger chunks of broken cookie for boulders.

For barbed wire, you can use spun sugar. Even if it is a bit messy, it will just look more barbed.