great idea. Lee

--
Have a wonderful day

"Nonny" > wrote in message
...
> 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
>
> ELOQUIDIOT (n) A highly educated, sophisticated,
> and articulate person who has absolutely no clue
> concerning what they are talking about.
> The person is typically a media commentator or politician.
>
>