I love homemade chocolate bark, it’s such a fun and easy treat to make at Christmas. This is the first batch I’ve made in a couple of years, and it’s so simple that I can’t understand why I don’t make it every year!
Like my Vanilla Extract post, this is so simple that I daren’t even call it a recipe.
All I did to make this batch was:
- Spread an offcut of greaseproof paper onto a baking tray
- Crush a few candy canes with a pestle and mortar
- Melt a bar of milk chocolate
- Pour melted milk chocolate onto greaseproof paper and spread into a vague rectangle shape
- Melt a third of a bar of dark chocolate (it was all I had in the cupboard – I could have sworn I had more but apparently not…)
- Gently dollop the melted dark chocolate onto the still-melted milk chocolate
- Use a skewer to swirl the dark chocolate into the milk chocolate and make it all pretty (you don’t have to swirl if you don’t want to!)
- Sprinkle the crushed candy canes onto the melted chocolate. Gently press the crushed canes into the surface of the chocolate if doesn’t look like it’s going to stick too well
- Put the whole thing somewhere cool (fridge/garage) to set for a couple of hours
- Once set, bash the slab up into nice big chocolatey shards and enjoy!
Easy as pie. It really only takes about 10 minutes to mix up, and then maybe an hour or so to set.
I actually wanted to use some almonds and raisins that I had for the topping on this bark, but the Boy wanted candy canes, so candy canes he got. There will definitely be some fruit and nut bark before the year is out though.
A couple of pics of how my bark looked it had set (I decided to make bark at about 9:30 at night so excuse the crappily lit photos!)
This stuff is just so simple and delicious, and the possibilities are endless. My original intention was to make a 3 layer bark (dark, milk and white chocolate) but there wasn’t any white chocolate at the shop I went to and I was too lazy to go on a supermarket-crawl-white-chocolate-hunt. I’ll save it for next time.
Chocolate bark makes an excellent Christmas gift too. I’ve given little packets of them out as part of Secret Santa gifts before. Just package it up in a little cellophane or paper bag and add some pretty ribbon. Simples. And yummy.
