I printed chocolate with a 3D printer and ate it

I hate to spread waistline-bad news, but yes, you can now buy a 3D printer that prints chocolate. Cocoa Press has been in development for ten years. Now, it’s finally here and I’m pretty sure it was one of the reasons I gained weight over Christmas.

At least it’s not cheap or easy enough to appeal to most people.

This holiday season, I received a $3,995 pre-made printer (you can DIY it for $1,750 or less) and 30 perfectly-fitting bars to achieve my deliciousness goals.

I connected the printer screen, set it up, put the dark chocolate “cocoa core” into the cartridge, added the washable plunger cap, preheated the chocolate for 30 minutes, and clicked start Ann grace… The nozzle was immediately seen trying to eat its silicone baking mat.

I’m not sure if it was a Z-height issue, or if the print head got knocked a little loose during shipping, but after I adjusted those two things, I tried again and ended up with this incredible 3D printed rose:

Look at that flower. Look at the ridge. Is all that surface area melting on your tongue? I can attest that it is delicious, tender, and delightful. This photo took almost a whole bar of chocolate, but it was gone after two minutes.

The best thing about 3D printing chocolate is the incredible textures you can create. 3D printed gyroscope filler? I’m not enough. (You can see some filler examples at the top of this story in my video.)

Yes, dark chocolate does taste like chocolate, albeit using palm oil as its fat instead of cocoa butter, presumably for better flowability. My wife absolutely loves dark chocolate and while it’s definitely not the best we’ve had, she was pleased with the quality.

But I can’t say the same for milk or white chocolate – they’re a little waxy and remind me of candy melts – and I never had the same success with the first rose. Because the worst part about 3D printing chocolate is controlling the heat.

This screw driver pushes the plunger into the slightly melted chocolate, spraying it out. Mine always sounded like I was struggling.

Printing chocolate is fundamentally finicky, and not just with traditional 3D printing methods. A cocoa press allows you to program the heat of the nozzle to tenths of a degree, because a few tenths of a degree can be the difference between hot enough to flow or too cold to come out of the nozzle.

In my case, the printer’s 65g chocolate syringe sometimes took several hours to reach an even temperature. Cocoa Press founder Ellie Weinstein said this was due to one of my heaters being defective and would replace the entire cartridge and heater assembly “for anyone who needs it,” but the heating could also depend on the chocolate itself. Dark almost worked with the Cocoa Press’s presets; Milk wasn’t difficult, but White took me most of the day, adjusting up and down every half hour to find a flowing temperature.

But even though I got the chocolate to flow nicely, I quickly discovered that I couldn’t print anything that was too small or pointy without drastically slowing down the print speed. The chocolate needs time to cool and set before the nozzle attempts to print another layer of warm chocolate on top.

It’s easy to see when the Sierpinsky Pyramid began to ooze:

Chocolate Scherpinsky Pyramid Nicely divided into four smaller pyramids for serving, and a central octahedron for your family to fight over.

Printing a single calibration cube may not make sense at all.

A very bumpy, overly smooth calibration cube. The glossy layer doesn’t have enough time to cool down.

Ideally, I would slow down these prints at a high level to give them time to cool down – but right now this is a manual task and Cocoa Press won’t automate it for you.

While single small objects are not that desirable, I also cannot print very large objects because 65 grams in a bar of chocolate is not that much. The pyramid weighs 59.5 grams, which is close to the limit of a single cartridge.

2.10 oz Pyramid Chocolate.

But you can print small objects, like these Mario stars I made:

Not a fan of the top surface texture of these stars, but they do taste good.

Alternatively, you can take advantage of vase mode, where the 3D printer prints in a single continuous spiral to build something tall and hollow. The rose is a vase pattern print, as is the bottom of this mock coffee cup – I printed the “cup” in white chocolate, and the “lid” on top in milk chocolate!

One of the cups in my video is made from two different kinds of chocolate.

Alternatively, you could theoretically replace the cocoa core with a new one after the first one is used up for longer prints… but again, it’s not automated. You have to program it to stop at the right point, or manually watch it and pause early when the battery is low. Even so, you must wait for the second cocoa core to warm up before you can continue printing.

I tried swapping 3 times. One time, I missed an opportunity and the printer ran out of power and just kept printing air. At one point, it appeared to print seamlessly, but then the print mysteriously failed. One time I tried switching from dark chocolate to white chocolate but the chocolate got stuck in the nozzle and refused to come out.

In practice, I found it much easier to simply print the object using most of the stick in one go, then use the remaining parts to print a second partial object, and then put it directly into my mouth.

The opportunity to resume this print was missed. Nice and simple touch screen buttons.

Despite my struggles, parts of Cocoa Press feel well thought out. I’m impressed that the popular PrusaSlicer is natively printer-friendly, all chocolate-contact surfaces can be easily removed and cleaned, and my device even came with a cleaning tool that fit perfectly. The touchscreen UI is easy to use, and if you know what you’re doing, there are all sorts of fanatical 3D printer tweaks available.Andrew Sink Tom’s HardcoreWho knows what he’s doing, he’s doing better than me.

Still, “you know what you’re doing” probably describes this printer’s audience. I can’t imagine a 3D printing novice having the patience to enjoy Cocoa Press even if they spend over $3,995 for the pre-made version, with each pack of 10 pre-made chocolate cores costing $49.

But I can definitely see some DIY enthusiast spending $1,499 on hardware, printing plastic parts on their existing 3D printer, spending 10-15 hours building it, and learning to make their own chocolate core – just because they Can.

Photo by Sean Hollister/The Verge

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