Guest Post: Tori from Nerdmama

Whelp, folks, here it is! In the Holiday Handmade Sekret Exchange I was lucky enough to have bee drawn for Tori from Nerdmama, who not only lives in Ohio but actually knows two of my friends! How coincidental is that?! When the box came with my swap gift inside I was kind of excited to see all of the chocolate it contained. Delicious chocolate cookies, peppermint bark, spoons and cocoa. The husband was also quite pleased, let me tell you, and the cookies didn't last more than two days.

So without further ado, let's give Tori a hearty Welcome!!

This is the story of how I made a box of chocolate for die Hausfrau and her family. I originally had grandiose plans of sewing something incredibly awesome, but that plan got scrapped when I realized that I should maybe be writing term papers and studying for finals instead of sewing things. Then I actually had to do all that responsible writing and studying, and the whole thing got shoved to the end of my to-do list until I opened a box from Justine over at a Half-Baked Life and realized that I should maybe take a break from making myself totally crazy to actually, you know, hold up my end of the holiday exchange bargain. I didn't have anything scheduled for the Thursday of finals week, so I took Pax shopping with me. We came home with this:

In case you can't tell, it's a couple bags of dark chocolate candy wafers and a bag of starlight
mints. We're making peppermint bark, here, folks. It's not rocket science, I promise.

The first thing you want to do is unwrap all the mints. This is a very important step, because you don't want to eat peppermint bark that is full of plastic. By the way, this is just a bag of mints from the dollar store. That's right, all those mints only cost a dollar. I love the dollar store.

The next thing you want to do is crush the mints by bagging them up and then beating the hell out of
them. This is probably the most difficult step, because the mints tend to shatter into sharp little pieces that eat through any sort of material you try to contain them with. You'll want to smash them with either a mallet or a rolling pin (I prefer a mallet). Putting them in a freezer bag is good because freezer bags are thick and they tend to hold up, but you're still going to want to double- or triple-bag it (and good luck getting all the air out so the bag doesn't fly open when you whack it). Paper grocery bags seem like a good idea, but again, you'll go through a few bags. Either way, you're going to go through a lot of bags.

Don't try not using a bag, you'll get mints everywhere.

You should eventually end up with something like this. Don't be alarmed if most of your mints seem
to have crumbled into powder, you'll still have enough chunks to make satisfying bark. Also: you'll always have a few mints that will not break no matter how much you hit them. I put them off to the side and then promptly ate them.

Your next step will be melting the chocolate. You can melt chocolate wafers like these in the microwave, but (in my opinion) that's a bit like asking for them to burn and become totally unusable. Once you burn
chocolate/candy, you can't use it. The texture goes all crumbly and it tastes gross. You don't want that. I used a double-boiler, kind of. It's just a stainless steel bowl on top of a pot of boiling water. I'm too cheap to actually buy a double-boiler, and this works just as well. Just heat up the water and keep stirring the chocolate as it melts, making sure that it doesn't get too hot and burn.

While the chocolate is melting (possibly even before then), lay out a piece of wax paper on a a
cookie sheet. When the chocolate has melted, add handfuls of the crushed mints until you get a nice chunky texture. Then dump the whole thing out onto the wax paper and use a spoon or spatula to spread it out evenly. Sprinkle some more peppermint on top.

Pop it in the fridge for 10-15 minutes. I admit, I only took this photo because I wanted to share
how well-organized my refrigerator was that day. (And yes, we have a Papa John's sauce hoarding habit.)

When it's cooled, break it apart (with your hands, silly, not the mallet) and put it in some sort of

container. I picked up these really cute Christmas take-out boxes from the dollar bin at Target. If you use decorative packaging like this, line the container with wax paper or foil or something. These boxes have glitter on them and I wanted to make sure that die Hausfrau was getting peppermint bark, not glitter bark.

I packaged the bark with some chocolate cookies I'd made earlier (the Better Homes & Gardens recipe for Chocolate Crinkle cookies, if you want to look it up), as well as a chocolate spoon and a packet of hot chocolate for each member of her family. Chocolate spoons are exactly what they sound like: before you add the mints to the melted chocolate for bark, dip a spoon in there. These were then sprinkled with peppermint sprinkles.

There you go. You can use this same process to make any kind of chocolate bark: nut bark (almond, peanut, walnut), dried fruit (cranberry, snipped apricot), crumbled cookies (Oreo, shortbread), sea salt, orange peel, dried chile... anything that you can use to make chunks, you can put in chocolate and make
bark. It's really hard to go wrong with anything mixed in chocolate. :)

Thanks, Tori! Everything has been quite delicious. We still have a few spoons and some cocoa left - I'm kind of a stickler for cocoa being a snowy day thing. Also - if and when Papa J comes into our house, my husband hoards the garlic butter too. He uses it when he makes popcorn on the stove top.