Spoon & Tamago - japanese art, design and culture

Forget Easter bunny chocolates. When it comes to reinventing the world’s favorite sweet, Japan does it best. From planetary chocolates to a chocolate-filled paint set, here are our favorite creative innovations using chocolate.

Onomatopoeic Chocolates

Nendo created “Chocolatexture” a series of 9 chocolates, all the same size, but each representing a Japanese onomatopoeic word that describes texture.

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Chocolate LEGO Bears

Japanese illustrator and designer Akihiro Mizuuchi decided to do something special for loved ones. He created his own chocolate LEGO bricks and then built chocolate LEGO teddy bears with them. Now that’s love!

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Chocolate Replicas of Your Face

Last year Fab Café in Shibuya held a workshop where participants – using a 3D scanner and printer – created a chocolate replica of their own face.

100% Chocolate Cafe

If you’re heading to Tokyo’s latest landmark, Tokyo Sky Tree, you’ll also have a chance to satisfy both your sweet tooth and your design tooth by making a pit-stop at 100% Chocolate Café. The cafe features an open kitchen that would make even Willy Wonka proud. Visitors can watch the process of sweets being made through a display of glazed boxes containing ingredients of 56 different types of chocolate.

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Planetary Chocolates

Combining astronomy and good eats sounds too good to be true. But the Righa Royal Hotel sells a chocolaty solar system that includes Mercury (coconut mango), Venus (cream lemon), Earth (cacao), Mars (orange praline), Jupiter (vanilla), Saturn (rum raisin), Uranus (milk tea) and Neptune (capuccino) – sorry, pluto is no longer considered a planet.

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Edible Art Supplies

For the inner-artist in all of us, design studio Nendo created this entirely edible set of chocolate oil paints. The limited edition paint tubes, created in collaboration with lifestyle magazine PEN last year, are made from chocolate while the insides are replaced by various syrups.

Rewind several years and you’ll find a somewhat-similar project in which the designer created a set of chocolate-shaped pencils. They were commissioned by top-chocolatier Tsujiguchi Hironobu. The pencils are served with a pencil sharpener to grate chocolate onto the desert.

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The Temple of the Chocolate Pavillion

Japan’s Ginkaku-ji in Kyoto is probably the most famous temple in the country. In the hands of artist Yasuhiro Suzuki the “Temple of the Silver Pavilion” gets a silver wrapping and a sweet filling.

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Eye-Catching Easter Bunny Chocolates

If you insist on going traditional, head over to the Peninsula Tokyo’s popular pastry shop, the Peninsula Boutique & Café. The pâtissier will dazzle you with cute chocolate creations made to resemble bunny faces.