Looking for a last minute geek gift? Make these DIY chocolate D20/gaming dice! Roll for initiative, then eat the die to hide your terrible roll.

You may have noticed a little sneak peek of these in our Gingerbread D20 post. We made them as gifts for our D&D group, using red and green candy melts (get them at any craft store and some grocery stores), and white chocolate and dark chocolate Ghirardelli baking chips (at grocery stores – any baking chocolate will do). Mmmm…

The magic behind making these DIY chocolate dice lies in one product that I wish we knew about years ago. THIS stuff (EasyMold Silicone Putty). It’s a silicone putty that you can use to make a DIY mold of anything you want. We got ours at Michael’s. It retails there for around $20, but they almost always have a half off coupon on their app or email, so it ended up being ten bucks. Not too shabby, especially considering the awesomeness.

It comes with two parts: a white jar and a purple jar. Basically you measure out equal portions of the white and purple goo, and mix them together until they are fully blended (we used a teaspoon of each, and after 8 molds have lots leftover for other projects). You have about 2-3 minutes TOTAL before it hardens, so be quick about it, and have your dice ready. Once it’s all mixed…

Form a semi-flattened ball, and push your die down into it. Don’t worry, it won’t harm any of your dice. Push the putty up the sides and around the die. We made a few D20 silicone molds, along with some D12’s and a D10. The D12’s seemed to come out best.

Cover your die until only a somewhat small hole remains at the top. Just large enough for you to be able to push (and push, and squeeze) the dice out of it. Yep, that’s part of the magic of silicone – it’s a little bit stretchy, so you can squeeze the [larger] die out of a [slightly smaller] hole.

Don’t make your silicone too thick, or the hole TOO small, or you won’t be able to push the dice out. You need it to be thin enough to be flexible (but not so thin it will rip!). We tried some with 2-piece molds as well, but found the single piece molds to be easier – if you come up with a different technique, we’d love to hear about it! We ended up with 6 little molds in total, so that we could make several dice at once. You might want to make just one to start though, for a little trial & error (disclosure: our first two attempts were total fails).

Once the mold has set for half an hour or so, push the dice out.

Now onto part two! Melt your chocolate. We melted our chocolate in a slow cooker, so that we could do several colors at once. You can use your microwave instead, or a double boiler. If you decide to melt chocolate in a slow cooker / crockpot, just fill some mason jars partway with chocolate, put the jars in your slow cooker, then add a couple inches of water (don’t get any water in the mason jars!!). Heat on high for about 20-30 minutes until chocolate is melted, then turn heat to low or warm and it will stay nice and melty as long as you need.

Once everything is melted, spoon the chocolate into ziploc bags, one color at a time. Cut a small corner off the bag, and squeeze it into your molds. As you go, tap/whack the mold onto a solid surface a few times, to get the chocolate to settle with as few bubbles as possible.

Throw ’em in your fridge and leave them alone. After half an hour or so they should be ready to be popped out. They might go flying across the room (you need some pressure to get them out), so aim them into a bowl.

Pretty cool, right? If you look at the D12 on the left you can see that some of the dice have a funny little stem on them, where the opening of the silicone mold was. Use an X-acto knife to smooth things out, then re-fill your molds and repeat until you are drowning in tiny delicious dice.

We did a mixture of solid colored dice, and dice with the colors swirled together. For the swirls, alternate which color melted chocolate you squeeze into your DIY silicone mold. Some of the dice came out better than others, some had big air bubbles or came out broken, but those happy accidents just became snacks for us, so everything worked out. 🙂

DIY chocolate gaming dice + mason jar & ribbon = unique geek gift. If you would rather buy than DIY, ThinkGeek sells a set of 6 chocolate dice for $7.99.

These of course don’t have to be holiday-only gifts. I’m thinking cute geeky Valentine’s Day gifts, or just snacks for your next game night. Oh, and you can also make DIY D20 ice cube trays, using this same method.

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