Who knew chocolate confectioneries and civil engineering could be such a great combination?

In Japan, the highest praise is given to food that’s not only a treat for the taste buds, but pleasing to the eyes as well. So when Japanese Twitter user @38beem decided to whip up a batch of chocolate ahead of Valentine’s Day, the appearance got as much effort put into it as the flavor did.

We’re not sure the result could be called “beautiful” in the classical sense. All the same, the chocolate really does look completely amazing, even if it doesn’t look at all like food.

At first glance, those appear to be photos of a rusty manhole cover set into a sidewalk somewhere in Japan. But the truth is that the whole thing, including the “asphalt” surrounding the manhole, is edible, and consdiering how it was made, probably delicious too.

To start the project, @38beem created a manhole cover-shaped mold out of silicon, then filled it with melted chocolate.

The “rust” is actually a dusting of cocoa powder, and the “asphalt” has a similarly mouth-watering secret.

Instead of concrete, the sidewalk is made of crumbled up cookie bits. To get just the right effect, @38beem used a variety of colors, adding a bit of edible bamboo charcoal (the same ingredient employed in Japan’s famous black hamburgers) and used slightly less than the amount of butter called for in the cookies’ recipe, to give them a drier texture and stone-like appearance.

The final result is one of the coolest manhole covers we’ve ever seen, which, this being Japan, is really saying something.

Source: IT Media, Twitter/@38beem