When I struggle with coming up with an i dea for a project, I redirect myself to the starting point and tell myself to think of something I love. I love a lot of things but chocolate was the first thing that came up to my mind, so I was like, why not?

In this invented universe, called Chocolatown, everything runs on cocoa. Cocoa is not only their currency, but also their power source. As shown in the sketches below, Chocolatown has only one cocoa tree – as the town’s ‘power plant’, it is huge enough to supply for the entire town. The tree is, of course, guarded and taken care of by the authority.

Ideally, on the tree trunk, are the cocoa extractor, coin generator and distributor. Coins are divided into three values, dark chocolate, milk chocolate and white chocolate. Since cocoa is what that is valuable, dark chocolate has the highest value and white chocolate has the lowest value

The coins can be used to exchange daily supplies and groceries. Machines like cars have a special compartment where you insert these coins and the coins are melted and the cocoa is extracted to power the vehicle.

However, when creating the pop-up book, I excluded the details of the extractor and distributor shown in the sketches above. I wanted the pop-up book to look fairy-tale-like, as if it is a myth about a faraway land. And that is also why I didn’t use a more ‘realistic’ color palette – green for leaves and brown for trunk. Instead I used gold, white, black and navy for the color palette.

As for the coins themselves, I decided to make them out of real chocolate because why not ! It is totally doable!!! As shown in the sketch (on the right) above, the town also has magical rubies which they insert into the coins. These rubies prevent the chocolate coins from melting in people’s hands or pockets. I used edible red glitter frostings to make that. I bought 90% cocoa dark chocolate, white chocolate and a silicon mold. I mixed the dark chocolate with the white chocolate to create the milk chocolate. I could have just bought the milk chocolate but I thought it would be fun to experiment with and besides, isn’t this exactly the way milk chocolate coins are made in Chocolatown?