Picture the scene: a balmy Sunday afternoon, barbecue smoke wafting over garden fences, children gathering on street corners to print out their 3D chocolate toys . . . OK, so this last might sound like the stuff of Star Trek fantasy, but your local chocolate dispenser could soon be a familiar sight – at least, according to Dr Liang Hao of the University of Exeter, whose team of research scientists has come up with a machine that prints out chocolate.
The machine works just like your average ink printer: a liquefied foodstuff (so far, just chocolate) is squirted out to a particular pre-set design and then gradually layered and cooled to create a three-dimensional, edible sculpture. It's a prototype as yet, but Hao believes the idea will catch on. "The aim is for the machine to use locally sourced ingredients and be part of the local community," he says. "Children could print out toys; adults could come up with their own designs. It would be like your local chocolate factory."
In January, a team at Cornell University in the US unveiled a similar machine that could "print" anything from cake icing to dome-shaped doses of turkey, and suggested that such machines could eventually be found in every kitchen. Hao's ambitions for his chocolate machine aren't quite so lofty – at least, not yet. "At the moment, the machine can't print other foods," he says, "and I think that people would want something in their kitchens that doesn't just print out chocolate. You can have too much chocolate, after all."
