White Chocolate Peppermint Bark

This is a late post. I made this White Chocolate Peppermint Bark during the holiday break for fun. I first saw a version of this recipe on Life on Manitoulin's blog. However, I couldn't find the White Baker's Chocolate it called for, so I found a similar recipe here which used Nestle's White Chocolate Chips. I thought, hmmm, easy enough.

White Chocolate Peppermint Bark

Ingredients:

1 (12 ounce) package Nestle Toll House white chocolate morsels
24 hard peppermint candies

DIRECTIONS

LINE baking sheet with waxed paper.

MICROWAVE morsels in medium, microwave-safe bowl on MEDIUM-HIGH (70 percent) power for 1 minute; stir. Microwave at additional 10- to 20-second intervals, stirring until smooth.

PLACE peppermint candies in heavy-duty plastic bag. Crush candies using rolling pin or other heavy object. While holding strainer over melted morsels, pour crushed candy into strainer. Shake to release all small candy pieces; reserve larger candy pieces. Stir morsel-peppermint mixture.

SPREAD mixture to desired thickness on prepared baking sheet. Sprinkle with reserved candy pieces; press in lightly. Let stand for about 1 hour or until firm. Break into pieces. Store in airtight container at room temperature.

One thing I would do is add a tiny bit of peppermint extract to the white chocolate. It tasted a bit plain to me. Also, I didn't use a rolling pin to smash the candies. I used this metal ice scream scooper we had and whacked those things in a zip loc baggie.
As a prime example of screwing up this easy recipe, I skipped "straining" the candies over the chocolate and dumped all the pieces in there. In retrospect, I should have dumped some, but not all of the candies. Why? The white chocolate covered the prettiness of the freshly crushed candies. I would have saved some of the bigger pieces and placed them on top of the bark as specified in the recipe!

That being said, it was relatively easy. Bert liked it, but you'd have to be a major white chocolate and peppermint fan to like this. It sure does look nice though.

Another recipe I saw on the web was pretty much the same except you dipped the broken pieces into melted milk (or you could even use dark) chocolate! Even better!