Take a rapid prototyping machine, such as direct metal deposition or stereo lithography. Instead of building 3d objects one layer at a time with plastic or metal. Build 3d objects with chocolate, frosting and various candies.
I figure you would have the equivalent of a hot glue gun that melts chocolate and applies it one layer at a time, you could have hopper of different blends of chocolate or caramel to get some extra treats.
Now imagine a birthday cake with an edible chocolate version of you, or a chocolate figure of a childs favorite cartoon character. Once the capital cost of the machine is taken care of individual creations would be relatively cheap to make and done in minutess-- metarinka, Oct 09 2010 Fused deposition modeling http://en.wikipedia...Deposition_Modelingexact same process but with plastic [metarinka, Oct 09 2010] Edible Photo Cake Frosting http://www.clm3d.co...ideas_site_map.htmlCould be done layer by layer? [csea, Oct 09 2010] Inkjet-Nutella Chocolate printing [xenzag, Oct 09 2010] The_20Delicious_20S...ot_20of_20Liquorice another of my food printers.... I have more, but not posted here. [xenzag, Oct 09 2010] candyfab.org http://www.candyfab.org/3D sugar [pocmloc, Oct 09 2010] This is what is technically known as A Very Good Idea.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Oct 09 2010 How long has this technology been wasted on plastic?!?-- Boomershine, Oct 09 2010 + Reminds me of the 2D version which has been around for at least a decade. [link]-- csea, Oct 09 2010 You could also use white chocolate then a manifold that delivers various amounts of food coloring to create a colored model.
You can basically do all this with off the shelf rapid prototyping hardware-- metarinka, Oct 09 2010 Yeah, but who wants to do something basically?-- MaxwellBuchanan, Oct 09 2010 Famous last words:
"I'd like to show you my prototype. I left it in the lunch room. It's made of 50 lbs of dark chocolate. "-- popbottle, Sep 02 2013 So wait, this idea was posted in 2010 and I can't buy a chocolate 3d printer yet? Where's the Kickstarter?-- DIYMatt, Sep 02 2013 random, halfbakery