#COSTCO PEPPERMINT BARK HOW TO#

If you don’t have any peppermint oil, it’s FINE to use peppermint extract: about 3/4 of a teaspoon.

Peppermint oil: if you happen to have any peppermint essential oil (and I did, and mine was DoTerra, so it was a food grade oil), use it to flavor the dark chocolate! I used 3 drops, tasted the melted bittersweet chocolate, and then added 1 more drop, to bump up the mint flavor just a smidge.

I had to give up and go with pulsing them till they looked right in my food processor, and while annoyingly loud, that worked fine. I tried breaking them in a big ziplock bag with the edge of a can, or a rolling pin, but nothing doing. Although I used those “starlight” wrapped mints, candy canes would also be fine. (If you use chips, you’re going to need to add more oil/fat in some form or fashion to compensate for the added stabilizer, so just don’t. And the goal here is to MELT the chocolate.

Use bars of chocolate and not chips. Those little chips have more “stabilizer” ingredients in them: that’s why they don’t melt all over your chocolate chip cookie.

Don’t let the hot water you’re melting the chocolate over touch the bottom of the bowl or double boiler. White chocolate is more finicky to melt, with more of a tendency to scorch or seize up than bittersweet chocolate, so, be gentle with it.

For the white chocolate, be sure the white chocolate you buy has cocoa butter (20%) rather than partially hydrogenated palm oil, palm kernel oil, soybean oil, or cottonseed oil.

The white chocolate is quite sweet, so you need a little bitterness to balance that flavor out. They have very similar levels of cacao, with bittersweet generally having a slightly higher level of cacao, and thus being slightly less sweet than semisweet.

For the dark chocolate, I used bittersweet, but you could also use semisweet.

My grocery store had Ghirardelli, and I didn’t want to make a special search anywhere else, so that’s what I went with. So no “artificial chocolate flavored candy coating” crud, OK? Lindt or Ghirardelli or Baker’s are the way to go. You actually do get what you pay for, for the most part, when it comes to chocolate.

Do not make this with inferior chocolate.

There is that.) Six Tips about the Ingredients for Peppermint Bark: You are going to HATE me for doing it, because good quality chocolate is somewhat expensive, but IT’S SO WORTH IT!!! (By my use of capital letters and exclamation points in this post, you may have gathered that I’m a little jacked up on sugar at the moment, but, hey: my breath is minty fresh. So, today, I’m sharing this easy recipe with you.

#COSTCO PEPPERMINT BARK HOW TO#

You would have been amazed at how many times needed to go back to the bakery section that day, not to mention how many times I circled the meat cases, just watching the meat age.Īnd then, I began making my children get samples of that chocolaty minty treat that they do not even care for (but I do, dangit)! Where was their Christmas Spirit? It’s all about giving gifts to OTHERS (and by others, I mean ~MOTHERS~).Īfter Googling How to Make My Favorite Christmas Crack:Īfter some serious googling, I discovered that making crack peppermint bark candy is super easy to do, and will not get you put in the DEA Watch List. The Peppermint Bark Pusher Lady was located at the end of the bakery section, right across from the meat cases. Almost equally delicious it was, to the stuff carried by Williams-Sonoma, but definitely much more affordable. Later, as I was careening through Costco, the carnival barker sample lady encouraged me to try some of Costco’s peppermint bark candy. It was beyond delicious! Creamy, and crunchy, cooling and deeply meltingly chocolatey, it was all things wonderful, in candy form. Just a crumb.īesides, the first one’s always on the house, if you know what I mean. How bad could one little bite of that be? So I took my first sample nibble of their crack peppermint bark candy.

One day, several years ago, as I was lusting my way through the Williams-Sonoma store, I spied a platter, covered with something that sort of looked like flat fudge.

I really prefer making cookies at Christmastime. Ah, the delights of peppermint bark candy! I’m not much of a candy maker, really.

Costco peppermint bark