- Hey everyone, you're watching Preppy Kitchen
where I, John Kanell, teach you how to make
delicious homemade dishes
to share with your family and friends.
Today we're making this classic no bake treat,
peppermint bark!
It is so easy and satisfying,
it's really great to have out. - Really good stuff.
- Like a little party,
some little things you can just pick up and nibble on.
And if you're wondering, where am I,
I'm at my friend Amy's house.
She's invited me over for some holiday baking and no baking,
and taken pity on a kitchenless soul like me.
- You're almost there though.
- It's almost there.
- It's the home stretch.
- So close!
Let's get started.
When you make this, you have a couple options.
You could totally use the fancy bar chocolates.
This is my last piece of like a Valrhona Chocolate Bar.
I have and I used this before when I made it for the blog.
Chop it finely, it'll melt more easily.
The nice thing about using chocolate with a bar
is that it doesn't have any stabilizers or anything in it.
For this recipe, we're gonna use semi sweet chocolate
although you could totally add in bittersweet as well
and I'm gonna use my scale
and measure out 12 ounces exactly,
but, you can totally eyeball this if you wanted to have
mostly dark chocolate with a little bit of white,
just use mostly dark chocolate, it's,
there's no rhyme or reason, nothing is gonna go wrong.
- Okay.
- It's like, oh my gosh, my bark didn't,
like it just dried.
So we're gonna put this on a double boiler now and
just mix it occasionally.
So I went to go get something from this drawer,
look at this, look at this drawer!
- [Amy] I'm a definite Virgo.
- What is this? - Oh my God.
- [John] What kind of baking magic is this?
Okay, anyways, we just, all we needed was a spoon,
but I got totally distracted. - Okay!
- I think I'll use the spatula.
- All righty.
- Pop that on to some simmering water
and you also want to make sure it's not touching the bowl,
it's a nice gentle steam heat.
Just every once in a while, come back and stir.
Stir, stir, but you know, come back every couple of minutes,
and then keep an eye on it when it gets closer.
You don't want to melt the chocolate all the way through.
Now for the white chocolate.
This is my nemesis, I was telling Amy earlier.
I am an okay baker, but I burn my chocolate all the time!
I'll like walk away, one of the kids is calling me,
the dog is barking, Brian has a question,
something happens, there's a delivery at the door,
I come back and the chocolate's burnt.
So you have to watch it carefully and use low heat,
if you're using a microwave, like 50 percent power,
20 second burst and stir in between
and don't melt it all the way through.
I can't stress this enough.
This is gonna go onto the double boiler now as well,
same as before.
Pop it on, just come back and stir.
This chocolate, look, it's already starting to melt.
I'm actually gonna turn the heat down.
We're going to take it off heat soon,
you don't want to melt chocolate all the way through
on a double boiler you wanna and melt it mostly through,
once you take it off the heat, continue the melting process.
See, look at that.
The white chocolate vegan's melting really quickly,
there's more cocoa butter in there.
Okay, so this is melted basically all the way through,
so I'm gonna take it off the heat now.
Now, in the meantime, Amy was here earlier
when I was prepping this dish.
So here's the deal, this is rounded
and you need to line it, so if you have a square dish
or one that's not rounded off, it's so much easier.
When I was making this for the blog, I didn't have,
I was like, I'm not gonna to use this dish,
so what I did is I used an old light bulb box that I cut up,
and I just lined up as parchment paper
and it was perfect 'cause all it is is a mold.
So you can make this in any kind of mold you want,
you can even use silicone molds if you like doing that,
if it makes you happy.
But here, we're just lining with parchment paper,
we've made four cuts,
and it just plops right in.
And that way, it'll pop right out after it's done.
- Easy! - If you want,
you can add things to your chocolate.
- Like?
- Well!
You can add crushed candy canes,
which we'll be adding them later.
You could add peppermint oil if you like,
you could add toasted walnuts or pecans or toffee or M&M's.
But we're just gonna leave this plain
because we're adding a lot to the white chocolate later.
- [Amy] Possibilities are endless, though!
It sounds like.
(dog barking)
I'll let them out.
- [John] I'll just wait a second.
- You gonna go out in the rain?
He actually wanted me to open the door
so he could smell outside.
- That's nice.
- Yeah.
This is what we do all day long.
- [John] Amy has a beautiful standard poodle
named Torrin and--
- Hi buddy.
- There he is.
(laughing)
And he gets what he wants!
Much like all of us wish was the case.
Right now, we're just spreading chocolate out with a spatula
into a roughly uniform layer.
Towards the edges, it doesn't have to be perfect.
This is gonna go into the fridge now,
just to harden up a bit.
So if you're in a holiday baking frenzy
and you like online shopping,
you were like yes. - Yes!
- And you like peppermint, you can buy crushed candy cane
in kind of like almost bulk,
so it comes in really big bags.
When you buy candy canes,
most of them are normally broken anyways,
have you noticed this?
- Always.
- It's crazy.
Crushing them is totally easy,
but the one benefit for buying the crushed candy canes
pre crushed, is that they're all crushed to the same size.
- Which is nice, right? - It's like a perfect,
uniform size, it's not powder, it's only big chunks,
and if you're using them for decoration
like I do in a lot of my cakes and cookies,
it comes in handy, just putting that out there.
Otherwise, buy some candy canes and continue crushing them,
it's really fun.
Okay, ready? - Yeah, I'm ready.
- I think that's good!
- It looks perfect.
- I don't even, I don't like peppermint candies,
like I don't want to eat a candy cane,
I like to put them on a tree,
but in baked goods, I love them, it's like Oreos.
Like, I would never say oh my God,
give me the Oreo, I need it now,
but in a, like if you mix it into butter cream,
some magic happens. - Yummy!
- Just putting it out there.
Okay, we have our candy canes crushed.
I'm putting this aside,
'cause we're gonna get that melted white chocolate out now.
You're gonna use about half a teaspoon
of peppermint extract.
That's not peppermint oil like you would use,
like in a massage or anything but it's,
it's an extract, so just drop that in there,
smells really nice too.
Mix it in, mix and mix and mix and mix that.
This has been cooling a little bit already
so it's starting to get thicker which we want.
Now we're going to get chocolate out of the fridge,
'cause it's ready, it only needs to be somewhat set.
You don't want to have the chocolate be all the way hard,
because your peppermint bark might not stick together.
It's liquid on the top, it's starting to set
towards the edge though, not set all of the way.
If your chocolate has sent completely,
you can cheat it using a hair dryer
and just soften the top a little bit.
Okay, pour that on there.
- Oh it smells so good.
- And you can actually marbleize it too
with a swirl if you want to. - Ooh!
Torrin's grunting behind us!
- Torrin's-- - He's like pretty sure
that we have something up here that he wants.
- [John] Like, um, I don't think this is on the doggy list
of things to eat. - Yeah, no, sorry buddy!
- [John] So now, we're gonna carefully
move it towards the edge,
just to smooth it out.
What's the last step?
- Of course!
- Crushed candy canes, do you want to do the honors?
- [Amy] Oh I do, yes please!
- I'm cutting this down for the camera.
(laughing)
Because apparently you can't see it!
Thank you.
Now, we did, would you like to do the honors?
- I would love to! - Oh, perfect.
- Doesn't that scream holiday all of a sudden?
I can hear--
- I feel like I'm gonna have to add this
to the holiday bakery list.
So are you using all of the candy canes that you crushed?
- No, we're gonna save some for later,
but you can add as much as you want.
- Maybe-- - Until you're happy.
Because-- - Yeah, I'm almost happy.
- The thing is, you're thinking like, oh that's enough,
but then when you cut it,
you really want to have
a lot of crunch and candy cane on top.
- Oh yeah, of course.
What do you think?
- I feel like there's a little bit at the edge we can get.
- All right.
- There we go!
This gets set aside just to like calm down, chill out,
and here's the deal.
We didn't temper this.
If you tempered it, and if you can temper white chocolate,
you're basically a wizard by the way,
but if you tempered it,
then you can just snap it into pieces.
We're gonna cut it into pieces
and it'll look exactly the same
with so much less effort and less heartache, trust me.
Okay, chill it out, and we'll be back in a minute,
with the magic of editing.
All firmed up, we (laughs).
Had a nice little talk
in between time. - Yup.
- And here, plops right out, totally nice and firm.
We're gonna use a knife to cut these
and like, what shape do you like your bark to be in?
- [Amy] I like it when they're a little more jagged
and you get to--
- [John] Like shards!
- [Amy] Yeah, you pick and choose
what size bite you wanna take.
- [John] Exactly, and they're like easier to nibble on too.
- [Amy] Yeah, exactly. - Should we take a bite?
- Oh, for sure.
- Dainty bites!
(laughing)
Screams holiday and it like, you know--
- Perfection.
- It reminds me of my childhood.
- Yeah, and we definitely didn't need to temper it,
because--
- No it's-- - It tastes delicious.
- It's totally fine.
- Not just fine!
(laughing)
It's fantastic!
- Sell it, Amy.
Thank you so much for having me over, this was--
- I'm happy to!
- A beautiful kitchen to be in and like,
those drawers changed my life,
you need to come over
and help me like whisper some suggestions
for where things go.
- I'd do that happily, yeah!
I love nothing more than organizing a kitchen.
- It's like a soulmate over here.
(laughing)
If you like this recipe, check out my Christmas playlist.
All of my favorite Christmas recipes
and you're guaranteed to find a new favorite yourself.
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