Painting Chocolates

Painting some silicon chocolate molds this evening with my wife.  These I painted half red and put white on the little divot in the mold.  Otherwise it will look like a mistake instead of intentional design.

As we wait for them to dry though I remembered a lecture we went to about paintings.  Way back, canvases were so expensive paintings were often painted over with other paintings.  One such painting was found this way.  It had been seen as a background image in another work and was thought to have been made up until X-ray scans of another work revealed it had been painted over. In chocolate molds it would be the opposite since the first thing you will likely see, unless the chocolate is too hot and remedy’s everything, would be the paint that was put down first.  In this case I could wash over the entire heart with a third color after this one cools down and you would only see what hadn’t already been painted.

Cacao Repotted

We finally repotted the cacao tree into its own pot as well as several of the new saplings about ten days ago. Finally getting around to posting it's progress though and it has also topped three feet tall!  This little guy has really taken off compared to the other trees.

Another couple of inches and I'll remove the box it's sitting on so it can have more room above it and it will still be fairly close to the overhead light.  I want to keep that as constant as I can as it grows up.

I think I see a small side leaf poking out about seven leaves from the top.  Hopefully this is the first sign of it branching out.  This should be happening about now, if not sooner.  Two of the other trees already have side branches and are much smaller than this one so I wan't sure what to expect.

It's still a long way off until we can expect any pods though. A minimum of four more years I would expect.  Before that time comes I should have already repotted this guy again in something twice as wide and at least a foot and a half tall if not two feet. Still thinking on that one. Aesthetics vs. root space.  We'll see which one wins out.  A shorter pot is usually more common in an office environment and would give it more room to grow up but a taller pot would give it more room for root support for the grownt I hope it gets.  Hard to decide until I see how it goes.

On the side there you can see the vanilla plants.  They've gotten so long I've draped one of them over the cubicle wall and the other one you can see the pot.  They're now nearly ten times the size from the time I got them.  Faster growing than expected for such a sub par environment.  I have been misting them with water though so maybe that's helped more than I thought it would.