Christmas Recipes: Peppermint Bark & Candy Molds

Another belated Christmas project. There was an evening before Christmas when I was completely done in; I'd had it with Christmas and all the demands of the season and the loss of sleep and the similar loss of time to do anything I wanted to do, so right then, even though my husband was sleeping and the baby was crying, all I wanted to do was assemble bags of peppermint bark and candy mold treats to give away and not take care of anything or anyone else because somehow the peppermint bark would take care of me me me me me me me me meeeeee so too bad, family! IF I DON'T DO THIS, CHRISTMAS WON'T EXIST. 

 That's the trouble with traditions.

I admit that eating at least half a cookie sheet's worth of peppermint bark over the course of just a few days did help, but it did not dissolve the unnecessarily sky-high levels of stress that entered our home in preparation for Christmas. In fact, it contributed as I tried to both lengthen our list of family traditions and execute all of them with extravagance.

Merry Christmas. Here's my recipe. Use with caution because I'd actually never done this before and made it up, so you're probably better off looking up a real recipe somewhere else.

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PEPPERMINT BARK RECIPE

woof woof

Ingredients
Vanilla candy melts
Dark or milk chocolate candy melts (or both)
Crushed peppermint candy or candy canes (I bought those huge ones from the dollar store and smashed them with a hammer)

Directions
Melt the chocolate candy melts according to instructions. Pour and spread a thin layer (1/8"?) evenly on a cookie sheet or pan lined with foil or parchment paper.

Before it sets, pour on the layer of vanilla [somehow] evenly over that. (Note: This is where I went wrong; I let the chocolate set before pouring on the vanilla so when it all cooled and I went to break it in pieces, the chocolate layer broke off and separated from the vanilla layer.)

Before the vanilla sets, sprinkle the peppermint over the top with a spoon or your fingers or a sprinkling contraption.

Let cool completely. Setting the chocolate in the fridge or outside in the cold works really well, and really quickly. Then break or cut the bark into pieces with a large, sharp, potentially lethal knife.

Tempering Chocolate: Boy Scout Candy Molds

At the tail end of my husband's service as a Scoutmaster (although, never fear, he's Scout Committee Chairman now; we shall never be free), I was at the local BSA supply store and saw these boy scout candy molds while he was buying merit badges for the upcoming Court of Honor.

Refreshments, anyone? Why would anyone attend these things otherwise? Is an embroidered patch really considered incentive?

Anyway, I've never tried working with candy molds before and just figured you could melt chocolate chips or something and pour them in.

Wrong. Of course it's so much more complicated. Most things are. (That is, until I learned about candy melts. See the "Chocolate-covered Strawberries" post.)

HOW TO TEMPER CHOCOLATE
Working with real chocolate requires tempering (here are Ghirardelli's chocolate tempering instructions). Too bad my thermometer broke, so I was kinda flying by the seat of my pants. But here are the steps I followed, essentially:

1. Buy bar chocolate. Apparently there's something in chocolate chips that makes them not right for this sort of process. I bought pieces of broken slab chocolate from the Winco bulk bins.

2. Chop up chocolate. Here's what mine looked like:

3. Melt 2/3 chocolate in double boiler. Remove from heat and stir in the rest to melt.

4. If you're smart, measure the temperature of the chocolate and follow directions. [I skipped this part.] 

5. Pour chocolate into molds and refrigerate to set. If you do it right, the chocolate is supposed to set beauifully with a nice snap when you bite or break it. Unfortunately, while mine looked really pretty, they didn't set very well and were melty to the touch and fairly soft even after being chilled. Maybe I needed to let them sit in the fridge longer, but we couldn't miss the Court of Honor, now could we?


6. THE MOST IMPORTANT STEP: Forget about this whole process and buy microwavable chocolate candy melts. Eeeeeeasy.

Recipes: Chocolate-covered Strawberries

I was in Utah for my sister-in-law's wedding and my mother-in-law had the idea to make chocolate safari animals as thank-you favors to give out at the African-themed wedding reception. Because I had trouble tempering milk chocolate for my Boy Scout chocolate experiment a couple weeks prior, we went to a candy makers supply store, Baker's Cash & Carry in Murray, Utah for some professional advice. 

There we discovered the world of candy making and supplies. It was like Willy Wonka's factory. We taste-tested chocolate wafers made for candy molds and went to town making hundreds of safari animal candies that week. 

What we learned about chocolate wafers is that unlike real chocolate, which has a cocoa butter base, the wafers for candy molds have a vegetable oil base so they don't require tempering and won't have cocoa butter streaks when they set. Winco carries candy wafers in the bulk section in all sorts of colors for melting if you ever want to play with it. I had no idea what they were before. 

Anyway, I brought home some of the extra wafers and was excited we had them on hand so I could use them again for some dipping. The chocolate melts so quickly in the microwave and sets super fast with a short chill. I didn't even have to put these in the fridge to set; I just set the plate by the open window and the cool night air was perfect for hardening the chocolate.

Looks like I'll be eating a lot more chocolate in my future. This stuff is far too easy to work with.