Tempered Peppermint Bark

Tempered Peppermint Bark
6oz dark chocolate
6oz white chocolate
3 candy canes (crushed)
2-3 drops peppermint oil

Start by lining an 8x8 pan with foil, shiny side up, smoothed so there are minimal wrinkles, and set aside.

Prepare to melt chocolate by filling two pots with water (about halfway). Set over low heat on stove.

While the water is heating, chop or blitz chocolates separately into small chunks and place in separate metal bowls (bowls should be able to fit on top of pots without touching the water or leaving gaps). Reserve one ounce of each chocolate to use as your seeding chocolate.

Once the waters have both started to steam, turn off the heat and place bowls of chocolate on top. The residual heat will slowly increase the temperature of the chocolates, allowing them to melt slowly enough to monitor.

Gradually stir each bowl to distribute heat evenly and periodically check the temperature of each. The white chocolate will finish first as it needs to reach a lower temperature than the dark chocolate.

Once the white chocolate has reached 102˚F, remove from the heat and place on a dry towel to prevent water dripping (if any water gets in the chocolate, it will seize). Add about a quarter of the reserved, chopped white chocolate and stir continuously. Check temperature periodically (and don’t forget the dark chocolate is still heating).

If the white chocolate temperature stops lowering and it has not yet reached 85˚F, stir in small amounts of the reserved chocolate until it does. If there there are any solid chunks of chocolate in the bowl still, scoop them out with a fork or small sieve.

Add one to two drops of peppermint oil into the white chocolate and stir.

Pour white chocolate into the prepared pan and spread out evenly with an offset spatula, or by gently shaking and tapping the pan. Move bowl and spatula out of your work area and wipe off the offset spatula to prepare for the next chocolate.

By now, the dark chocolate should be close to temp.

If the dark chocolate has not heated completely and the temperature is no longer rising, turn the stove back on low with the bowl on top. Once the thermometer sees a temperature increase of any amount, turn off the stove again. You may have to take the bowl on and off the pot to control the temperature and not let it heat too quickly.

Once the dark chocolate reaches 122˚F, remove from the heat and place on your dry towel. Add about a quarter of the reserved, chopped dark chocolate and stir continuously. Check the temperature periodically until it reaches 88˚F.

Add one or two drops of peppermint oil to the dark chocolate and stir.

Pour the dark chocolate onto the white chocolate and spread evenly with your clean offset spatula. Sprinkle crushed peppermint on top. Allow to set for at least 20 minutes before breaking into pieces.

Remove chocolate from the pan by lifting up the foil. Carefully peel chocolate off foil and place on a sheet of parchment. Place a second piece of parchment on top and use a rolling pin, hammer, or any other heavy object to hit the chocolate and break into pieces. It’s now ready to serve or package into bags for gifts!

Tips
- Do not use chocolate chips - they contains ingredients that prevent the chocolate from melting and will not temper
- Do not use flavor extracts. These are water based and will cause the chocolate to seize. Use oil based flavors (Lorann Oils)
- Keep your work area dry - a drop of water in your chocolate can cause the chocolate to seize
- Wear and apron and have a towel ready to wipe off hands and thermometer - chocolate is very messy and you don’t have time to clean and dry every time you take the chocolate’s temperature.
- Turn off the stove when you put on the bowls. If you leave it on, even on low, the chocolate may heat too quickly and you will miss your temper window. You don’t want to race to the correct temp and rush to cool it down. You want a temperature to just barely reach it’s temp so it is steady enough that you have time to work with it.
- If you are apprehensive about tempering both chocolates at the same time, you can do one at a time, but the two may not fuse together and the layers will separate. Try lightly scraping the top surface of your first layer after it has set to give the top layer a slightly rough surface to adhere to.
- Supplies I recommend - apron, two towels (one on you, one on the counter), two metal bowls, two pots, two spatulas, an eye dropper for the flavor oil, candy thermometer, brownie pan (8x8 or 9x9 pan), foil, small offset spatula or a bench scrapper.

Tempering chocolate.

All of my previous exposure to the tempering chocolate process has been from cooking competition shows where they’re rushed and nothing ever goes right. It looks so complicated and probably impossible unless you’re a professional chocolatier. Heat it. Cool it. Heat it. Cool it. Swipe it around on something. Scoop it up. Start over.

So, I never really set out to try to learn. Until I had this burning desire to make peppermint bark out of no where. From what I could tell, a lot of home bakers are content to just melt chocolate and sprinkle candy on top. You totally can! But, if I learn that something can be done better, I want to do it better. A shiny chocolate with a solid snap is so satisfying, especially when you’ve made it yourself. So I groaned a little and announced, “I’M LEARNING ABOUT TEMPERED CHOCOLATE NOW”.

When I began my research, I was falsely comforted by several resources that the process is “easy” and you just have to microwave it and ta-dah it’s tempered. I was sure it couldn’t be that easy, but so many people were saying it. After several trials though, I think that once you really figure out the process it DOES feel pretty simple after you’ve done it a couple times. So, easy once you practice I suppose.

But, that’s encouraging, right? I like to bring recipes here that are actually attainable. I sort of feel like if I can do it, you can do it. You just need some patience and practice. I’ve declared that I would never bake again ever so many times in the past because I just couldn’t do it. I would go pick the most complex recipe or design and want it to be perfect the first time. I wouldn’t even consider that I might have to do it a couple times first for it to be just right. It was always something like mixing up tablespoons and teaspoons, or powdered sugar and flour (that was pretty great). It’s not that you can’t. You just need to practice and learn and not let the dumb mistakes define your whole deal. Try again. I bet you know not to do that thing again.

I asked my husband to make this recipe while I read the instructions to him, and he was able to get perfectly tempered chocolate his first and only time!

What I’m trying to say is that I’m not here to trick you into thinking tempering chocolate is easy-peasy. But give it a go, and you’re going to learn your own little tricks that will make next time better. And I hope that my little tricks will help you get there quicker, because patience is hard. You’ll get the hang of this faster than you think.

And maybe buy more chocolate than you need in case you want to more than once.

Start by collecting your tools and making sure everything is ready. I don’t want you going into this thinking you have to be super quick every step of the way, but timing is important, and you’ll be less stressed if you don’t have to rush around trying to remember where you left those candy canes while you smear chocolate all over your kitchen.

Wear an apron too. I had so much chocolate on me my first go at this and I haaaaated it. Chocolate is so greasy and you can’t just rinse it off. An apron and a towel will allow you to wipe chocolate off your hands and tools easily. This is especially useful for your thermometer, as you’ll want to take the temperatures of two different chocolates quite a few times. Just wipe and move on.

In my research, I also saw a lot of conflicting information about the material of the bowl you should use. Some people were insistent on plastic, while others were like, whatever, and some said glass or metal. So which is it? Does it matter? Or are you just grabbing whatever bowl you have? Well, I’m going to tell you a thin metal bowl is best. So, not microwave for you. And I am going to be insistent on the metal bowl thing here because I tried glass and ceramic, but both were too difficult to control the temperature. It’s like cooking over an electric stove vs. a gas stove. You can do either, but it’s going to take some time to get used to one or the other because they heat at different rates. A metal bowl will give and take whatever temperature you give it, quickly. So if you find that you’re starting to heat up too quickly, removing the bowl from the heat is going to have a faster impact than if it was in something thick that retains heat.

Grab your apron, two towels (one on you and one on the counter for drips), two metal bowls that will fit on top of the pots of water, two pots, two spatulas, an eye dropper for the flavor oil, candy thermometer, brownie pan (8x8 or 9x9 pan), foil, small offset spatula or a bench scrapper to smooth the chocolate into the pan. Oh, and of course, your ingredients (chocolate etc…). I also recommend crushing the candy canes before you start heating the chocolate so you don’t have to in between.

This recipe will fit nicely into a brownie pan, but if you want to double it, I’d go for a sheet pan or a deep cookie sheet. I made up little treat bags of these and it seemed reasonable to give about 5oz per bag, so one batch of the recipe makes about two…not servings, but two packages? Two people are getting these per batch.

Line the brownie pan with foil so when the chocolate is tempered it can be lifted out of the pan easily. I recommend the shiny side facing up, as tempered chocolate will take on the texture of the surface it’s on. Since it’s going to be the bottom though, it’s not a huge deal if it isn’t super shiny.

Fill your pots about halfway with water and heating slowly. My husband asked why you wouldn’t just crank it until it started to steam, and then turn it off. I just spent the last 45-ish minutes trying to answer that for myself. In practice, heating slowly worked better for me. I found that when I heated the water quickly, the temperature of the chocolate ended up harder to control. I wanted to be able to give a science-y answer about molecules and vapor but I couldn’t really figure it out. If it reaches the correct temperature to begin to steam either way, does it matter how you get there? Probably not. Maybe the pot ends up hotter so the water doesn’t cool as well…?

Just go slow, ok? Or don’t and then you can show off that it worked anyway. I just know that everything from heating the water on felt more manageable to me than if I rushed it.

You don’t have to have the chocolate ready the second you turn off the heat. In fact, it’s probably best to wait a minute or two after the burners are off before you top the pots with your bowls. Heat slowly. Heat slowly. Control. Your. Temperature.

While the pots are heating up, chop up the chocolate. I just use a knife and chop, chop, chop into smaller chunks. The smaller the chocolate, the more precise you can be with your temperature. In my first trial, I was being a weiner about chopping and figured I could just break the chocolate into a couple pieces. And maybe that would be fine with a bigger batch of chocolate, but here, the pieces were too big to all melt before the rest of the chocolate was the correct temperature. Go smallish, but you don’t have to go all the way to powder.

From each type of chocolate, pull out about one ounce of chopped chocolate bits to keep for later. This is called the “seed”. You’re holding onto some chocolate that is cold and already tempered so that when you add it to your melted chocolate later it will lower the temperature and encourage the melted chocolate to temper as well.

Once the water has started to steam, it’s hot enough to melt the chocolate. Turn off the heat and place your bowls of chocolate on top. It shouldn’t take long for the chocolate chunks to start melting. Once there’s enough of a pool, start monitoring the temperature and stir periodically to keep the heat even throughout.

The white chocolate wants to get to 102˚F before it begins cooling, so keep an eye on it. The dark chocolate won’t want to cool until 122˚F so you should have some time to deal with the white first before it’s ready. Remember, go slow. If the temperature seems like it’s rising too quickly, just remove the bowl from the heat for a minute and stir and place it back on the heat if needed. You don’t really want the temp to go past your mark, so it should really juuuuust barely get there.

BUT-

If it does go over a little, don’t worry too much. In my trials I have seen the temperature blow past 102˚F by more than 20 degrees… It’s not ideal, but it still came out alright. It might make more of a difference if you’re using the chocolate for a more complex recipe (or maybe a more simple recipe), but it still tempered for me. As long as it doesn’t burn, I think you still have a good chance to save it.

Check your dark chocolate one more time before you get fully involved with the white. If the temperature is still rising slowly, you’re fine, but if it’s a bit too close to 102˚F or is rising a bit too quickly that it would go past that temp before you’re done with the white, just move the bowl off the heat for now. It can just sit for a couple minutes while you work, and when you’re done, return it to the heat to rise the rest of the way. Just try not to let it get real cool. It’s best if it stays around the temp it was at when you removed it, so if you feel like you’re taking too long with the white, check the dark and maybe put it back on the heat now.

It both is complicated and sounds more complicated than it is. Just keep your second chocolate in mind and check on it once in a while. Spelling it out makes it sound like a lot of steps, but you’ll have the intuition on what to do when you get involved. Too cold - heat. Too hot - cool.

So, you have your white chocolate at 102˚F now. Lift the bowl off the pot of hot water and place it on the towel on your counter. Water is very dangerous to chocolate, as it will make the chocolate seize, or stiffen up into clumps. Since you were heating with steam, the bottom of your bowl will be wet and when you go to pour the chocolate into the pan, you’ll drip water in if you don’t dry it off.

Toss in a couple bits of your reserve chocolate that you set aside earlier. Stirring in this chocolate is going to cool down the melted chocolate and encourage it to succumb to the peer pressure of becoming tempered. As the temperature lowers, add less and less amounts to keep it lowering. You just want to aim for all of the chocolate to be melted when it reaches its target temp so there aren’t any chunks at the end. If there are, you’ll want to pick them out with a fork or even your fingers. Otherwise, the tempered chocolate you worked so hard on will have lumps. Blech.

Once you hit the lower temp of 85˚F, stir in a couple drops of the peppermint oil (for some reason I always forget to do this) and then pour into your pan. Smooth the chocolate out and into the corners with your offset spatula or a bench scraper (or anything flat). Nice! It will take a couple minutes to set so don’t touch! Clear off your dirty dishes. It’s time to finish the dark chocolate now.

You’re going to go through the same basic routine here, just with different temperatures. When the dark chocolate reaches 122˚F, remove it from the heat, place it on the towel, and stir in the seed chocolate. At a low temp of 88˚F, add some peppermint oil, stir, and pour right on top of the white chocolate. I had some trouble in a couple batches where the two chocolates would break apart from each other once they were set. You’d bite into a piece and they would pop away and become two different shards. Since starting the chocolates at the same time instead of one then the other, I haven’t run into this. I think it’s because the first layer sets into such a smooth surface that theres no texture to grab onto by the second. So, I would suggest just gently running a forked along the top of the first layer if there’s been a lot of time between the two. You’re more likely to get a solid piece in the end. Gently though. If you really go for it, you’re going to dig into the chocolate a lot and you’ll be able to see a lumpy line throughout when you break it in the end. Big deal? No. But not perfect.

Once the dark chocolate has been smoothed out and looks so perfectly luscious, sprinkle the candy cane bits on top. Just go for it! I think the more candy, the better the result. I also weirdly have a preference for Target’s Wondershop candy canes. That sounds dumb, but they come out of the wrapper so much easier than any other candy cane I’ve ever struggled with opening, and they have a great crunch that isn’t so hard it’ll break your teeth. I feel like they don’t get so sticky either as others I’ve had, but maybe I’m giving them too much credit.

Give these a few good hours to harden. They set within a few minutes, but they don’t have the perfect snap until they’ve had time to dry out a bit. If you want to cut these into clean shards, use a knife within the first hour to cut. Otherwise, I cover them in parchment after a few hours and smack them liberally with a crowbar that for some reason is in the kitchen. I like the shattered look best. If you try to use a knife at this stage, it’s gonna be haaaaaard and will probably still mostly shatter.

Can you believe you just did that? YOU MADE TEMPERED CHOCOLATE. It’s shiny and smooth and looks like a professional did it. YOU SO COOL! These are such a hit with neighbors, family, and friends this time of year, so go for it! I already have so many ideas for other things I want to do with tempered chocolate now. SO MANY THINGS. All these years I was too scared and convinced I’d never get it, and now I just whip up a batch any time of the day because nbd it’s just tempered chocolate whatevs don’t make it a whole thing weirdo.

I hope these details are helpful and don’t instead overwhelm you. I found that the various instructions I tried to follow were always too vague for me to understand what was going on and I had to make a lot of guesses. So I really wanted to pack in everything I learned from this!

Please continue to be cautious out there. It’s been such a long time now of quarantine and fear, that it’s easy to become complacent. We’re all kind of used to it now, and frankly, bored. Stay strong and remember that you’re doing this for the people you love.