Cookies ‘n’ Hot Chocolate

by Maryam on February 17, 2010

My food photography instructor, Ron, was very happy with my performance in the first assignment. In fact, not all the three submitted images were great. One of them was a total mistake, but the other two showed “outstanding work” as he commented. Still, I didn’t master the lighting professionally, however I have gained a great sense of lighting effect whenever I take pictures these days. You can see one of these two successful images in the Molten Chocolate Cake post (hint: it is the one which the chocolate chips are on the scale) .

The second lesson for this week subjected on camera angles and lens selection. Oh .. it seems difficulty and complexity started to show up! don’t know what I would do for the second assignment. I don’t want to judge right now, since I didn’t even read the first page of the lesson .. what a shame.

While I’m writing the previous paragraph, I decided to open the printed lesson pages and read. After two small paragraphs my eyes stopped at this sentence “one of the biggest mistakes we see over and over again is that people tend to shoot all of their images from the same angle of 45° in relation to the subject. Essentially the same angle we see everyday when we are sitting at a table looking at our breakfast, lunch and dinner” do I do this a lot, I thought, I don’t think so. Oh my God, the most pictuers of this post were taken at that angle, this was so clear. At the end I knew that I was one of the people who shoot most of their images from the same angle of 45°. “I told you I needed a food photography course” I told myself.

Ron said in his second lesson that, as we lower our cameras angle from 45° towards 90° we will increase the perceived depth, hight, and width of the subject. This is interesting, I didn’t know about this fact, though I took some good shots at this position.

For the flat subjects Ron said, shooting from directly overhead works perfectly fine. If the object has height and you still want to shoot from that angle, Ron suggested to be very careful with the aperture selection and point of focus.

Cookies ‘n’ Hot Chocolate

Usually my carvings for chocolate starts Thursday night, you know Friday is my open day; which means tomorrow! Every time I search for a recipe I end up with an invented one! Simply, I carved for a hot chocolate, searched the internet, didn’t find something satisfying, so I decided to go and try my imagined recipe .. the result was Cookies ‘n’ Hot Chocolate, unbelievably fantastic.

Ingredients

500 ml milk ( you can use whatever type of milk you prefer)

1 medium size mars bar

1 table spoon unsweetened chocolate powder (I used hershey’s)

1 medium size Cookies ‘n’ Chocolate hershey’s bar

Whipping cream for garnish (optional)

Making the Cookies ‘n’ Hot Chocolate

In a saucepan, heat the milk till boil. Add the mars, hershey’s, and unsweetened chocolate powder. Readjust the heat to low. Start to stir the chocolate combination with spoon or by using wire whisk. When all the chocolate melts except the Cookies ‘n’. Trun the heat off, and pour the hot chocolate into two meduim size mugs or one big mug. Spare one inch on the top for the whipping cream.

This step is absolutly luxurious! Garnish the top of the mug using whipping cream maker/dispenser and very little amount of podwer chocolate. Serve immediatly and enjoy the taste.