The Chocolate Flower Star Swirl

Here's another simple chocolate swirl design that won't take too much effort to get right but will still impress your friends. You're going to make a small flower design with chocolate and milk foam. Then you're going to use your tiny screwdriver to get the chocolate syrup to swirl around the flower. This design is fun because you can modify it any way you want to. It will help to get you thinking creatively about your next design foray.

Always begin with great espresso and great milk foam. To get a perfect milk foam texture, you will need to use the steam wand at an angle to the side of the pitcher towards the end of the steaming process. This causes the milk to swirl around the pitcher, which in turn gives you a perfect foam texture. Don't forget to pound out a few of the bubbles that are likely to form inside your pitcher as well. This ensures consistency.

The fun thing about the chocolate syrup designs is that the complex part doesn't occur in the pour itself. You just have to pour most of the milk into the cup and then use a spoon to scoop the foam you'll be using on the top. It's as simple as that. For this design, we want you to create a single 1cm diameter dot of foam in between the bottom and middle of the cup. It should be slightly offset from the center with plenty of space between it and the cup's edge.

With your dot in place, get out your chocolate syrup squeezer and squeeze some chocolate syrup around the outer circumference of your dot. After that, take the squeezer and create an arc of chocolate syrup running from the middle left side of the dot to the middle right side of the dot. When you are done with this, the top of your coffee cup should have an off of center chocolate bordered foam dot with an incomplete chocolate ring that gets close to, but doesn't touch, the left and right middle sides of the dot. If this is what you have, you can move on to getting out your mini screwdriver for the next part.

You are going to create a flower out of the chocolate bordered dot. Make sure you have a towel on hand because you will have to wipe off your mini screwdriver every time you dip it into your latte. Begin from the center of the dot and move the screwdriver out past the chocolate border. You will want to do this five times, beginning from the center each time and making sure there is an evenly distributed space between all of the flower's petals. If you did this right, your circle with a chocolate border should look more like a five-pointed pinwheel shape.

Now, just as you have created points by moving the chocolate from the inside out, you need to do the same by moving it from the outside in. You have five spaces in between the five points on your pinwheel. Use the screwdriver to bring the chocolate from the outside of the design to the center at each of those five locations. When you are done with this, you should have something that looks just like a flower.

With the hard part done, take your screwdriver and use tiny swirling motions to swirl the chocolate arc that runs around your new flower. The smaller you can get these motions, the more intricate your design will look. Now stand back, and there you have it, the chocolate flower swirl. It's another easy design to add to your repertoire and to get you thinking creatively. Play around with this one for a bit and see what else you can come up with. We'll be looking for it on the forums!

Learn more about making Latte Art in our Latte Art How To!