Beauty and the Beast

Looking at illustrations of Beauty and the Beast the meals Beauty and Beast share are often shown which suits my theme well. These pieces are by Charles Robinson, Margaret Evans Price and Edmund Dulac (thanks to SurLaLune)

My initial research was looking at a feast of petit fours which are french miniature desserts and cakes but the number of ingredients to make each piece would be too expensive. So instead I decided to use macaroons to portray a rose, a creme caramel for Beauty and a Moelleux au Chocolat for Beast. Together it will look like a feast and from above they will be made to look like what it stands for e.g. I'm going to try piping a chocolate portrait of a lady on the creme caramel and making the melted chocolate from the Moelleux vaguely beasty...

I started first with the creme caramel:

And then it all went wrong...

The first batch looked horrible, smelt of egg and didn't taste very good, so I tried another recipe which went wrong before I even got to baking, the mixture was meant to form stiff peaks but I just ended up mixing for half an hour with no change to consistency. Then we tried beating the eggs before adding sugar which went fine until we added the food colouring and it became exactly the same consistency as the mixture beforehand. I lost patience at this point. I think I need powder food colouring but not entirely sure where to get it. I may end up just using the creme caramel and Moelleux au Chocolat.