Peppermint bark (and bonus candy)
23 Dec
[Happy birthday to my dad, my cousin, yours truly and a few friends who are born two days before Christmas, and to anyone out there gets one combined gift every year. I feel your pain. Let us commiserate with peppermint bark. I hope you all have a safe and enjoyable break with loved ones! Merry Christmas! 
]
Peppermint bark is one of my favorite holiday treats! It only contains only four ingredients (dark chocolate, white chocolate, peppermint extract, candy canes) yet tastes amazing!
Use high-quality dark chocolate, and you won’t be disappointed! Also, be careful while tempering the chocolate. I like to slowly melt it instead of shocking the chocolate into submission, especially since burning good chocolate would be a travesty.
The challenge here was to spread out the chocolate as evenly as possible. One of the things that I would do differently next time is to crush up the candy canes more carefully, and mix them into the white chocolate so that they don’t fall off.
Recipe: Peppermint bark
Makes one sheet (9 x 13 inch baking pan)
Ingredients:
1 12 ounce bag of Nestle white chocolate baking chips
1 11 ounce bag of Ghirardelli Bittersweet 60% Cacao Baking Chips
5 crushed up candy canes
2 teaspoons of mint extract
Parchment paper
Baking sheet
Procedure:
1. In a small pot, bring water to a boil. Then lower heat to maintain a bubbling, low simmer. Place a bowl large enough to sit over the pot and slowly melt dark chocolate, until smooth.
2. Remove from heat and add peppermint extract.
3. Cool for about 5 minutes.
4. In a baking pan, line with parchment paper. Slowly pour dark chocolate and smooth it out with offset spatula.
5. Refrigerate for at least 3 hours.
6. Crush candy canes by placing them in a bag, then going over it with a rolling pin. Or use a hammer to crush them into small bits. I think using a hammer is a much better method, as I had varying sizes of candy canes that were difficult to work with!
7. Melt the white chocolate chips using the same instructions from step 1. Once the chocolate has been cooled for 5 minutes, stir in crushed candy canes and pour slowly onto firm the dark chocolate.
8. Place baking sheet in the fridge and let it firm up in the refrigerator for another 3 hours.
9. Once the chocolate has set, break up chocolate sheet into pieces by using parchment paper to hold it in place.
Speaking of peppermint, here is a bonus photo of a wonderful treat I had the other day! My friend C brought them back from Taiwan (Hi W!) and they were scrumptious. We were just confused about the British Flag. Any idea why that’s there?
