Naples gets 'Chocolate Genius' to help Storytellers group to a sweet ending

Everyone wants the story to have sweet ending. With Paul Joachim, it's guaranteed.

The chocolatier and chocolate sculptor can create anything from an eagle in flight to Marilyn Monroe in her famous updraft moment — all of it in chocolate, all of it delicious. He will be in Naples on Nov. 15 to create one of his original pieces for the Kaleidoscope of the Arts, the inaugural fundraiser for Storytellers Creative Arts.

Storytellers Creative Arts is hoping for sweet endings, too, among the disadvantaged groups its instructors work with: children in shelters, veterans, women in recovery, teens and adults with mental health issues. This fundraiser is meant to help them with the storytelling arts classes they provide for those groups (see information box).

Joachim, 46, who has been dubbed "The Chocolate Genius," was busy Tuesday designing his masterpiece for the event. It's a larger-than-life, working chocolate kaleidoscope, with colored sugar "glass" bits inside. It's nearly fully edible.

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"I had to use a real mirror in it," he conceded.  "I tried things like edible foil, but really nothing could replace the mirror."

Some of his characters with slender legs — birds, the Marilyn Monroe figure and a life-size figure modeled on Wonder Woman — also need inedible support such as an food-grade aluminum or steel armature to bear the weight of the rest of the body. Still, Joachim tries to keep those to a minimum. 

A long time ago, Joachim graduated, not as a sculptor, but with a bachelor of fine arts from FSU with emphasis on painting and drawing. 

In 2006, he decided to create a fancy cake as a surprise for his mother:  "It was for my mom's 60th birthday party, and it was a 3-D cruise ship cake. And the light bulb went off. I said, 'There's something to this.'"

"I taught myself everything I could about sculpting cakes ... I was a big Food Network junkie," he said. His goal: to be on "Extreme Alien Cake Challenge."  In 2011 he was — and won the competition.

"And that's when I decided, 'This is what I want to do for a living,'"  Joachim said. Since then he's been back to the network as a guest star on several shows. He's appeared on CBS' "The Talk" and Australia's "Today" show, among others. 

Joachim's cake sculptures began to taper off when he saw the kinds of things he could do with chocolate ganache. But the eureka moment was his discovery of modeling chocolate, which behaves like clay.

"I can't remember the last time I did a cake," Joachim said. "I get hired to do all these chocolate sculptures all around the world."

From his Orlando-area home he's been flown to both coasts and as far as Australia and Pakistan, where he created five chocolate artworks for a major celebration by the makers of Magnum ice cream.

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Joachim's success revolves around his skill as a realist sculptor who can work quickly and deftly. Many of his creations he sculpts on the spot for guests. Others have been created and shipped thousands of miles.

"You'd be surprised how strong chocolate is," said Joachim, who has sculpted outdoors in 90-degree heat and where the temperature was 44, which actually made the work harder. White chocolate is a little softer, he said; to create a white chocolate piece, he prefers to make a base of darker chocolate and coat it with white.

Joachim has been as thoughtful about his materials as about his process. He uses Felchlin couverture chocolate not only for its higher percentage of cocoa butter, which gives it a richer flavor, but because the company purchases directly from farmers, returning more of the money to them.

"It's very important to me to use chocolate that is fair trade and they're paying the farmers right," he said.

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Joachim has created full human figures, birds in flight, life-size likenesses of LeBron James and a bust of Robin Williams. For a corporate client, he created an entire bouquet of chocolate flowers, painted with colored chocolate paint, for guests to snip off and take home.

It's all been meticulously pre-engineered in his mind. A good deal of his success depends on a strong ability to plan, he emphasized: "You just can't run out to the store and buy something."

He recalls the panic from his hosts in Pakistan when they couldn't procure the Callebaut chocolate, which they use for their Magnum ice cream, for his sculpture. Joachim had to bring it. 

"It was $5,000 worth of chocolate, and we had to put it in our bags. We brought 400 pounds of chocolate under checked bags," he recalled, laughing. "But it worked. You can make it work.

"These projects are not easy. They're logistically very complex. And that's part of what I love about my job, too, is it's very analytic, and it's very artistic." 

Kaleidoscope of the Arts

What: A silent and live auctions, dinner, entertainment headlined by the Dan Miller-Lew Del Gatto Quintet; Paul Joachim, the “Chocolate Genius”; and storyteller and author Bob Petterson, among others. Proceeds go to the work of Storytellers Creative Arts (SCA), a faith-based nonprofit organization that creates healing and nurturing arts outreach for people who are disadvantaged, homeless, disabled, visually impaired and in recovery

When: 5:30-8:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 15

Where: Naples Hilton, 5111 U.S. 41 N., Naples

Admission: $175

To buy: storytellerscreativearts.com

Information and contributions: 239-287-7331