Hilton Americas-Houston Goes Texan with Half-Ton Chocolate Rodeo Display
HOUSTON (FOX 26) - These boots aren’t made for walking….they’re made of chocolate! Everything’s bigger in Texas and Hilton Americas-Houston’s larger-than-life chocolate rodeo sculpture is no exception. Entirely hand-sculpted from over a half-ton of dark chocolate and chocolate dough – equivalent to 107,920 chocolate kisses or 2,365,440 calories – this year’s sweet work of art showcases events of the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo.
Hilton Americas-Houston Pastry Chef Mahesh Weerasinghe has teamed up with returning Pastry Chef Glenna Artripe to create a rodeo chocolate display that brings the Wild West to Houston with the hotel’s fourth-annual larger-than-life chocolate rodeo display, featuring a life-like cowboy and cowgirl at home on the range.
Award-winning Chef Mahesh, trained by one of only 13 Certified Master Chefs® in the U.S., and renowned Chef Glenna, an award-winning culinary artist with specific expertise in chocolate sculpture, together have created a one-of-a-kind confection that will have guests craving chocolate the moment they walk into the lobby of Hilton Americas-Houston. The larger-than-life chocolate rodeo display weighs in at over 1.5 tons.
“Each year we plan to enlarge the scene, adding more chocolate every rodeo season,” commented Ruffy Sulaiman, executive chef, Hilton Americas-Houston. “We’ve recently added a life-size horse made from 350 pounds of chocolate.”
The western scene also includes oversized cowboy, cowgirl, calf, wagon wheel and cactus, each individually created in the hotel’s kitchen using chocolate as a sculpting medium and then combined into the Wild West vignette in the hotel’s lobby rotunda