Thread: chocolate bark
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Nonny Nonny is offline
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Default chocolate bark

Since I did the melting on a side burner outdoors, this isn't too
far off topic. If any of you are looking for something easy and
quick to make for a food gift, consider peppermint bark. Trader
Joe's here in town has some really decent chocolate for about
$3.50/#. I got 3 pounds each of their 72% dark, milk and white,
and stopped by Kmart for a pound of Brach's peppermint disks.

The disks were unwrapped and coarsely ground in the food
processor, then set aside.

I used a heavy duty outdoor-type 50 gallon poly trash can liner,
taped flat to the picnic table as the working, non-stick surface
for the bark. The dark chocolate was broken up and melted in a
double boiler. I wrapped my carpenter framing square with masking
tape and used it as the leveler. The melted dark chocolate was
poured on the black poly liner and spread out as thinly as
practical with the wrapped square.

While it hardened in our 34f weather, I melted the milk chocolate
middle. This was poured on top of the dark layer and spread
thinly over the top, with a strong attempt to keep it as level and
smooth as practical. This was then repeated with the white
chocolate, after a clean-up of the pan, square and spoons. I also
waited a bit longer between coats, so that the double layer of
dark and milk chocolate were fully hardened.

Finally, the white was added and leveled. Immediately, I
sprinkled on the crushed peppermint pieces, covered it all with
Saran wrap and pressed the peppermint pieces into the white
chocolate surface lightly. Everything was covered with towels and
the (appx) 2' X 4'; sheet was left to cool and harden fully.

An hour later, the sheet was broken into large pieces and brought
inside, where the pieces were whacked with the back of a
tablespoon to shatter them into bite sized pieces. Packaged in
the smallest fixed price USPS box, they made one heck of a great
gift to send out to friends and old neighbors from other
locations.

It's pretty simple and the learning curve is more about when to
add the layers than how to level them. If you add a layer too
soon, there's a lot of bleeding between the colors of chocolate
and if you let the earlier layer(s) harden too much, the next
layer won't melt the previous enough to get good lamination.
Outside of that, when you're done folks will think you really did
something and the whole thing can be done from start to clean up
in under a couple hours and the cost is quite reasonable.

--
Nonny

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