Exclusive: Weaving Willy Wonka’s Christmas chocolate magic

Gaining global headlines for recreating Willy Wonka and a series of famous faces in chocolate has proved a richly-rewarding challenge for ‘the chocolatician,’ Jen Lindsey-Clark, as editor Neill Barston discovers exploring her West Sussex studios

As adventures within the confectionery world go, producing a life-size chocolate sculpture of Timothée Chalamet’s recent incarnation of Willy Wonka is about as cool as it comes. While there’s undoubtedly a considerable amount of time pressure, creative challenges and technical demands attached to ensuring the project for the major Warner Brothers movie studio met its schedule, it’s a task that its creator truly thrived on.

“It was the ultimate dream job,” recalls Jen Lindsey-Clark of her work surrounding the release of the re-imagined confectionery musical, Wonka, which required every ounce of her skill and determination to pull off in time for its demanding deadlines. Clearly, hers is far from being considered an ordinary career, to which the brightly adorned walls of her company’s cosy studio barn on the edge of Worthing in West Sussex duly reveal. Taking pride of place in one of its walls is a cherished note from the late Queen Elizabeth II, thanking the West Sussexbased self-styled ‘chocolatician’ for a project sculpting confectionery Corgi dogs, which were great favourites of the late ruler.

This prized royal seal of approval sits alongside other memories of her remarkable journey to date, including a miniature version of a King Charles head, commissioned by Mars Wrigley, celebrating the British monarch’s official coronation. Among other stand-out prints is one of an impressive chocolate replica of the Orient Express train which featured at St Pancras Station in London, marking the release of the recent Kenneth Branagh movie version for the great detective Hercule Poirot. These form just a few of her many highlights to date in what is continuing to prove a richly rewarding, if somewhat unpredictable career for Jen in terms of the timings of her commissions.

“It’s still lovely when people ask me what I do, and I am the ‘Chocolatician,’ I am a chocolatier, and people say, wow, what’s that about, which is really nice,” she says of her work, which offers plenty of satisfying highs, yet is not without its tests. As she states, there’s very much a ‘feast or famine’ nature to the commissioning aspect of her larger ventures is, she accepts, part and parcel of working in creative industries, and something she remains especially proud of in building-up her business specialising in chocolate art, that celebrates its tenth anniversary in 2025. While there may be others operating within the creative confectionery space, the sector continues to be particularly competitive for specialised project work, yet it is Jen’s commendably upbeat approach in devising her own chocolate clay making technique, that has been a breakthrough development. “I am not your traditional chocolatier, I’ve carved my own niche in the industry. I started out as a pastry chef in my 20s, but always loved working with chocolate, which was the really magic bit for me, the fact you could melt something, and like alchemy, that you can mix things in, heat it up and cool it down and go solid at room temperature, and all the science behind it was really fascinating,” explains the 45-year old of her continuing passion for pushing boundaries in creative confectionery.

Crafting Wonka magic As she reflects, for the Wonka project, she collaborated with nearby fellow creative Worthing business, Plunge Creations, specialists in designing sculptural heads, led by Tim Simpson.

This left her with a key challenge of developing the life-size body of the most famous fictional chocolate character in history, which proved a hugely satisfying project that required a considerable intensity of focus. Notably, as she explains, there’s nothing quite like the sensation of completing something as epic as that memorable piece, which rightly drew global media attention. But as she reflects, the work’s very creation was in fact in doubt, as its delivery came at the peak of the US actors’ strike, with management approval for the hugely ambitious project going down to the wire – thankfully it all worked out as intended in the end. “For Wonka, I got to go to the movie premiere, which was amazing.

It was a night of a lifetime. The original Willy Wonka film with Gene Wilder was my favourite film as a kid, and I was just obsessed with it. “So, we had to get someone to dress as Timothée Chalamet in similar clothes, and created a 3D print for it, while the team at Plunge worked on the head for physical sculptures, to get the likeness of faces is a real talent, and they were amazing at that. Making a chocolate body as we did is something that just takes practice and patience. “I worked on it with another sculptor for six weeks on it and it was built on a metal armature, like a stick man, and we then decided to use giant marshmallows and dip them between the armature which gave it a bit of give in the movement.

It’s completely life size, and was set on a big plinth at my other studio here and it was about 7ft in all, so it was huge,” she says of the marathon effort, which used 100kg of premium-grade chocolate, and provided a perfectly magical manner to celebrate Christmas last year. As Jen concedes, there were some testing technical hurdles to overcome in terms of its detailing, with the sculpture being based on extensive pictures of its subject from all angles, as well as video. These formed the inspiration for the creation of initial food-grade silicon rubber moulds to which the chocolate is artfully applied.

Thankfully, by that point she had already amassed some notable relevant experience after the major commission that kickstarted her business in style back in 2014 – being asked to produce another full-scale chocolate replica of actor Benedict Cumberbatch, just as the major BBC Sherlock Holmes series landed. As she recalls, this was also something of significant collaboration that was to help propel her company to recognition. With some amusement, she says one of her most enduring items for Easter, the ‘Cumber bunny celebrity mash-up’ as she terms it, bearing his likeness, was to gain global exposure after TV chat show host Ellen DeGeneres interviewed the British star, who duly offered up praise for her artistic endeavours. Such invaluable publicity led on to future major ventures that propelled her business to producing a regal replica of King Charles for last year’s Coronation.

“That was a hard one to do, but the team came together. Tim (from Plunge Creations), found that when there’s some guidelines of wrinkles with someone’s features, then that makes it a little easier, and having done the Queen previously, there were definitely some similarities. “What was a joy for me was in having the job of how we were going to use the Celebrations chocolates to decorate,” she remarks of the experience. Intriguingly, the finished work, weighing in at 23kg, had been destined to be placed in a giant Tesco superstore, but on safety grounds, it ended up at Mars headquarters in Slough, UK, where it remains to this day.

Creating a USP

As she explains, one of the unique aspects of her work is in using pure chocolate, rather than lower-grade modelling varieties. She favours fine Belcolade Belgian chocolate in her work, which Jen notes as being particularly significant in that the variety has a strong ethical production standard that is linked to improving the lives of cocoa farmers in core supply chains in Ghana and Ivory Coast in West Africa, which are critical to the market. It’s these cocoa programmes, which acknowledge ongoing issues of child labour existing within those core growing regions, and put in place strategies for enabling greater opportunities and pay for agricultural workers that will ultimately make a difference to the lives of many working within the frontline of the industry.

As for her own work, producing globallyrecognised sculptures for major international confectionery companies is a long way from her Hampshire roots, working in the kitchens of Lainston House Hotel near Winchester, which gave her a solid grounding in culinary skills as well as gaining NVQ kitchen management training. She looks back on her time there fondly in the pastry department, working for head chef Andy MacKenzie, whom she describes as the ‘nicest man a commis chef could ever hope to have as their first boss,’ then going on to graduate to working as a pastry chef at award-winning Brighton-based vegetarian restaurant, terre a terre. Moreover, that too offered plenty of learning curves, and she struck out on her own in developing her own specialist dessert business, She Bakes wedding cakes in 2008, that led to her ultimate passion of working full-time with chocolate.

“When (my son) Ted started school, I had more time to look at the business of She Bakes and it was around the time Great British Bake off was in its prime. Everyone either knew someone who would like the challenge to make their wedding cake for free, or there was so much saturation in the market of home cakeries that I needed to do something about my business to make it really stand out. “I went to get some business mentoring from a friend Julia Chanteray, who advised me to keep making things that amateur bakers would not be able to compete with.

“Things that might scare them, caramel and chocolate work, which involves so much science, skill and patience that it seemed natural for me to specialise in this. The Cumberbatch project came shortly after this and the rest as they say is history,” adds Jen regarding her vibrant journey to date, which is showing no signs of inertia.

Educational opportunities

Beyond the headline-grabbing mega projects that crop up during the year, Jen is equally passionate about the other aspects of her business, which includes running workshops for groups of adults, as well children from across the area. Indeed, It’s that chance to give back to youngsters who may well form the next generation of chocolatiers, explaining that she enjoys taking a hands on approach to her engaging sessions. “It’s great to have the kids here, they love it – most people love chocolate. It’s an easy win.

They make various chocolates, and biscuits, and I teach them to do chocolate transfers that they make lollipops with. Depending on the season we might do baubles for Christmas and Easter Eggs, and also show them some techniques for sculpting things like flowers – which they can they all take home to eat. “They like to hear all my adventures, including with Willy Wonka. I don’t know where I can go from there, as it was a lifetime dream and my ultimate hero, to have reproduced something that was so part of me and the foundation of my passion for chocolate, and all things sugary and all the magic that was in that film.” Furthermore, as you might imagine, she’s partial to doing a ‘little Wonka-ing’ in developing some of her own chocolate for retail outlets and markets, which is continuing to offer up intriguing challenges as a contrast to her grander-scale works.

As for the future, there’s always a fresh challenge on the horizon, often something unexpected, which ensures that her life is anything but dull. “I’ve never done a building before – maybe something like the White House. I would like to do a female character, perhaps a Taylor Swift mash-up design,” she enthuses of the many potential creative roads down which her exceptional work may take her