'Horror chocolatier' makes gory Netflix film props

Sarah Hardy says she has carved a niche out for herself as a "horror chocolatier"

A food artist who calls herself a "horror chocolatier" has carved out a niche creating edible skulls, hearts and insects which have featured across film and television.

Sarah Hardy runs The Edible Museum at her home in Sible Hedingham, near Halstead, Essex, with one her earliest commissions coming from Mick Jagger for his daughter's birthday cake.

She has used her background in sculpting to create chocolate frogs and beetles, catching the attention of Netflix's newest Frankenstein adaption.

"One of the problems with what I do is you have to know that it's chocolate, otherwise you just think you're looking at a mould or a model or a toy," she said.

Even before making edible anatomy, Ms Hardy said she was creating "strange sculptures".

Her material of choice changed when she became pregnant and she started creating in the kitchen.

"I learnt to make really accurate moulds so I use a lot of moulding as well as sculpting and that's where my work looks different from normal chocolates because I can use the real thing and sculpt it. It just takes a lot of time," she told BBC Look East.

Ms Hardy says she can make up to 50 chocolate hearts in a day

Her creations are made out of milk, dark and white chocolate - with white preferred for skulls - and can see her working into the early hours of the morning with some items taking weeks to make.

She said the skulls could be "really difficult" to create, making up to 10 day compared to the 50 chocolate hearts she could made a day.

She jumped at the chance to have her work featured in the latest Netflix adaptation of the 1818 Mary Shelley novel, Frankenstein.

Directed by Guillemo Del Toro, the film stars Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein and Jacob Elordi as his monster.

"We get quite a lot of queries and questions to make exciting things and mostly they don't come to fruition," Ms Hardy continued.

"In this case it's come through and I know it's in the film; it's just really exciting."

A range of chocolate beetles were commissioned to feature in the Frankenstein adaption and were taken to Glasgow for filming

Ms Hardy was commissioned to make human hearts, bugs and beetles for the film which she said were coloured specifically to refer to people or episodes of the character's life.

She said once the props had been delivered to Glasgow, filmmakers asked for "a lot more".

"Gore is my thing," she added.

"I love horror and I've carved out this niche. It is a very small niche of being the horror chocolatier."

While her creations look incredibly life-like, Ms Hardy says she often stays up working until the early hours of the morning and can spend weeks on one piece