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West Coast Pimp

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If it is going to be your 24th birthday, and you are inspired to pimp something for your party, and your party is going to be in a different city in a different state to which you will travel by airplane, I highly recommend that you do as I did and pimp a liquor-filled chocolate bottle, such as can be purchased at airport duty-frees worldwide. This will not only make you popular with the party attendees, but will make the day of the airport security check point person who gets to wand your bag for both drugs and bombs as she attempts to understand why you have a giant chocolate bottle in your carry-on.

The first step in making a pimped liquor-filled chocolate bottle is an extensive Research & Development period. This is mainly two weeks spent looking at a pack of normal liquor chocolates and covering in melted chocolate. This allows you to make a number of useful observations about what goes into successfully pimping this delicacy. You will quickly realize that the finished bottle must be durable (to survive the flight, or just a rowdy party), water-tight (unless your intention is to pimp a chocolate shell with an alcoholic puddle around it), and have a respectable capacity, so as to prevent having to re-fill the bottle constantly. With these factors taken into account, you are ready to begin the pimp.

1. Acquire supplies. Quality chocolate is essential for a sturdy bottle (cheap chocolate has a high sugar content that hinders its ability to re-harden, once melted–as proven by an extremely disastrous trial with Hershey’s chocolate). In honor of San Francisco, where the bottle and I spent my birthday, I used Ghiradelli’s semi-sweet chocolate, which hails from SF. Here is everything you need:

Supplies and Cost:
6 bags of chocolate chips, $15
1 empty 48 oz canola oil bottle, plastic, $3
1 balloon, $1 per bag
1 plastic tube, about 1-inch in diameter, $2 (mine originally contained bath salts)
duct tape, $2 per roll
box cutter, $1 at the hardware store
metal nail file (I already had it)
1 24 oz bottle of Frangelico (hazlenut flavored liquor), $12

Total cost: $36 or £19

2. Prepare the mold. Empty the bottle of oil. Cut the top off below the lip, and set it aside. With the box cutter, slit the plastic bottle down the each side to about 1/2 inch above the bottom. To create the form for the inner liquor reservoir, fill a balloon with water until it is of a size that will fit easily inside the widest part of the oil bottle, with 1/4-1/2 inch clearance on all sides. Then tape the water balloon to one end of the plastic tube. Use duct tape or another similarly water-proof tape. The tube I used was about an inch in diameter, large enough to fit easily inside the neck of the oil bottle, with 1/4 inch on all sides, and about six inches long.

Next, put the reservoir inside the oil bottle by pulling the split-open sides apart. When the reservoir is inside, use lots and lots of duct tape to seal the sides where you slit it open. Use as much tape as you need to make it water tight, and tape laterally as well as vertically on the seam. I used almost a whole roll. This is where it is very important to have a smooth-sided bottle, because otherwise it is very tricksy to reseal the bottle. Doing the bottle as one solid piece prevents potential leakage from seams

3. Melt the chocolate. And melt it all at once, because if you do it in stages, layers may form in the chocolate which will create leak points. This is hugely technical. I used a double-boiler, because I have one, but I suppose the microwave would work just as well.

4. Fill the mold with chocolate. Lean the reservoir tube to the side, and pour a cup or so of molten chocolate into the bottle. Lift the reservoir by the tube to let that chocolate settle on the bottom of the bottle, and then let the reservoir rest on top of it. Continue to pour in chocolate, occasionally hitting the bottle-mold against the counter, or whatever hard surface you have handy, to make sure it is tightly packed with no bubbles. When you get to the base of the neck, straighten the tube so it is centered in the neck of the bottle before filling the neck with chocolate. Fill it right up to the top, and then use a left-over bit of chocolate to fill the previously cut-off top of the oil bottle (with lid still on). This forms a plug to seal the bottle later. Put the filled bottle and lid in the refrigerator. The reservoir may float up in the bottle, so I wedged something between the top of the reservoir-tube and the shelf above the bottle to keep the reservoir at the right place in the mold while the chocolate hardens. Let the chocolate harden over night, or less if you’re confident it’s hardened.

5. When your bottle is ready, take it out of the fridge, but leave it in the plastic bottle while you remove the reservoir form. Tape a straight pin to a chopstick, or rig up something similar, and stick it down the tube to pop the water balloon. Then turn the bottle upside down to drain the water out. Next, run a metal nail file under hot water, and run it around the neck of the bottle, between the chocolate and the plastic tube, all the way down to the end of the tube where it is taped to the balloon. It will take a while, and several re-heatings of the file, but when you can twist the plastic tube around it is ready to be removed. I used pliers to pull the tube and popped balloon out, which made an excellent squelchy noise and splattered watery chocolate all over the walls. When you have the reservoir out, get your box cutter and slice down the taped seams to remove the chocolate bottle. Or, if you are into prolonging the anticipation, strip the tape off piece by piece. That’s fun, too. Pull the sides of the plastic bottle apart to slide the chocolate bottle out. If you scratch it, you can use warm water to polish the bottle.

6. (optional) Put the bottle back in the plastic form for safety and pack it and the chocolate-filled bottle top in bubble wrap in a shoe box, and put it in your carry-on bag. Go to Portland International Airport, and spend ten minutes being searched at security while they wand the shoe box with everything they can think of. Don’t bother offering to show them the bottle, because really the security personnel just like to wand things with their drug- and bomb-sniffing wands. When they have decided that you will probably not be able to get high off of or blow up the airport with your chocolate bottle, proceed to your gate and board the plane, and fly away.

7. Finish the bottle. Pick what kind of alcohol you want to use. We picked Frangelico, because it is delicious and also because it tastes of hazelnut and we thought it would be good with chocolate. We were right. Pour the alcohol into the chocolate bottle, and be amazed, as we were, by the capacity of the reservoir. The entire 24 oz bottle fit inside, and stayed inside with nary a leak.

This is when the chocolate-filled oil bottle top comes into play. Pop the chocolate plug out of the bottle top and stick it in the chocolate bottle. If you are hardcore about sealing the bottle, melt the chocolate on the lip of the plug and the top of the neck of the bottle before sticking the plug in. If you are more concerned about getting to the point where you can consume the bottle and its contents, just plug it and wrap the bottle. We delegated the job of making the foil wrapper to the one of us with a degree in fine arts, and he immediately vetoed making the pimped bottle match the Frangelico bottle, because it is shaped like a monk. Instead he decided to match on of the titchy bottles in the inspiration set, the Malibu coconut rum, I think because it was blue and pretty. Cover the bottle in foil, and then apply the label with whatever means you deem appropriate. In this case, it was a printed label and several trial and error attempts before we ended up with a blue foil bottle. The bottle was 9 inches tall and weighed 2 lbs empty, more like 3 lbs filled.

Then we had a party, and you can, too, with a fabulous pimped liquor-filled chocolate bottle.

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