This easy 4-minute peppermint bark recipe will quickly become a family favorite. It makes a great gift as well when you package it up in a cute mason jar!
Friends, there’s this new invention out there, and I just have to tell you about it. Chris went out to the store and picked one up the day after we brought baby Jack home from the hospital years ago, and I’m just loving this thing. They’re calling it a microwave! Have you seen these? Amazing! They’re the perfect tool for this 4-minute peppermint bark recipe.
OK, now seriously, the story is that we had been without a microwave since our last one died a few years prior to Jack being born, and honestly I hadn’t really missed it. We decided we should probably pick one up, though, when we had a new baby around the house just to make life a little easier with heating up leftovers and making quick meals and stuff like that. I had been really resisting the whole microwave thing for a few years and didn’t think of myself as a “microwave person,” but now I use it all the time. I guess it’s just one of those things where you say “When I’m a parent, I’ll never do that” and then you end up eating your words just a few years later.
So this Christmas candy recipe is made in the microwave, just like my ever-helpful homemade pancake syrup recipe that so many of us know and love.
More essential sweets: Soft and Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies
Ingredients Needed for the Easy Peppermint Bark
This peppermint bark is something that I make every year, and people always seem to find it irresistible and say it’s the best thing they’ve ever had in their life, so it’s a good one to know about. It’s a great thing to make for a little DIY Christmas gift for anyone you might still want to send a little holiday treat to as well.
You’ll need:
- Dark-chocolate chips or milk chocolate candy melts
- White chocolate chips or white melting candy wafers
- Peppermint candy, mint flavored candy canes, or pre-crushed store bought candy cane bits
- Peppermint extract
That’s it! These really are the easiest chocolate mint Christmas treats. I love to add a few pieces of peppermint bark and other Christmas candies to my cookie trays, along with all the gingerbread, shortbread, peanut butter cookies, and all of the other staples to bring an extra sprinkling of color and delight.
How to Make the Peppermint Bark Holiday Candy
As with a lot of my favorite recipes, the amounts you use for the ingredients don’t really matter. What you need to get is some milk chocolate melting wafers and some white chocolate melting wafers. When I sent Chris and Kennedy out to the bulk foods store to get them, I just told them to get me about 1/2 a scoop of each. The milk chocolate that I use is called “compound milk chocolate” and it’s a little cheaper and, I guess not as “high quality” as the other chocolate, but in my opinion, the cheaper melting chocolate always makes the best batches of peppermint bark. Of course, you can use high-quality bittersweet chocolate if that suits you better, and it will work out to be quite tasty as well.
Here’s a photo of Kennedy helping me make the peppermint bark one Christmas quite a few years ago. Awwwww! So cute! If you follow along with me on Instagram, you know that she’s grown up quite a bit since then.
Another holiday cookie to include on your dessert table: The Very Best Soft and Chewy Ginger Molasses Cookies
Melt the Chocolate
Start out by placing your two different types of chocolates in two different microwave-safe bowls. Melt the dark chocolate first in the microwave in 30-second increments. Always melt chocolate slowly, a little at a time, and stir after each run through the microwave to check the melting progress.
When the dark or milk chocolate is fully melted, repeat the same steps with the white chocolate.
Add a dash of peppermint extract, only about 1/4-1/2 teaspoon, to one of the bowls of chocolate. We used to always add our peppermint to the white chocolate, but something seems to have changed in recent years with the formulation of the white chocolate, and adding the peppermint seems to cause it to thicken up immediately. So, we now add it to the darker chocolate.
Next, pour the melted chocolate out onto a baking sheet or cookie-sheet lined with wax-paper or parchment. Use a rubber spatula to make sure you get all of it out of the bowl.
After that, do the same thing with the white chocolate and pour it right on top.
Swirl The Chocolate Together
With a butter knife, swirl the blob of chocolate and spread it around a bit so that you have a thickness of about 1/8″ in most areas. Of course, when we break the peppermint bark apart, we want it to break up into shards and chunks of different shapes and sizes, so perfection is not required here. It’s our family’s firm belief that perfect little squares of peppermint bark are just wrong and they really don’t taste as good.
Add Candy Cane and Other Toppings
To make this confection really easy, I usually like to buy pre-crushed candy cane from the sprinkles section of the bulk foods store. If you can’t find that, you can use round peppermint candies or regular candy canes and just crush them yourself by placing them in a thick ziplock freezer bag and using a rolling pin to crush them up. Of course, this takes a bit more work, but the bonus is that it’s lots of fun. 🙂
Sprinkle the broken candy cane bits of the chocolate, along with any other toppings you’d like to use, like cookie bits or festive decorative sprinkles.
Refrigerate and Break
It only takes a minute or two for the whole thing to harden and solidify in the fridge, and then it just needs to be broken apart into smaller pieces. I like to make diagonal cuts with a big knife to get it started, and then I break up any larger chunks after that as needed.
Those original process photos are quite old now, so here’s how our most recent batch of finished peppermint bark turned out. It’s our firm belief that peppermint bark should be broken up into shards and chunks of all different shapes and sizes. Part of the joy is picking out just the perfect piece, and perfect, uniform squares of bark just aren’t the same and don’t taste as good. The more imperfect, the better the peppermint bark tastes.
Gift Giving: Peppermint Bark in a Mason Jar
Peppermint bark makes an easy and thoughtful holiday gift for your hostess or your neighbors when you pop a few of your prettiest pieces in a mason jar and tie it up with a bow. This is the perfect way to finish off a gift basket of special kitchen items, or you can include the recipe and some ingredients for making another batch. Mason jar gifts are always a fun idea at Christmas time.
Who wouldn’t like to get a little treat like this?
Do your gift recipient a favor and make sure the jar is decorated really cutely. That way, they might want to keep it on their counter to enjoy for a few days before they open it up and start wolfing it down. Once that jar is open and you get a taste of the peppermint bark, there’s no going back. Resistance is futile!
Try this chocolatey Christmas treat next: 3 Ingredient Date Fudge Recipe
Printable Peppermint Bark Recipe
This easy 4-minute Peppermint Bark recipe will quickly become a family favorite, and it makes a great gift too!
- Milk Chocolate Melting Wafers (just some)
- White Chocolate Melting Wafers (about the same amount as milk chocolate)
- 1 dash Peppermint Extract
- Crushed Candy Canes (to sprinkle on top)
-
Melt the milk chocolate and the white chocolate in the microwave in two separate bowls. Pour about 1/4-1/2 teaspoon of peppermint extract into the milk chocolate and stir.
-
Pour the milk chocolate down onto a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.
-
Pour the white chocolate right on top of the milk chocolate.
-
Swirl the two colors together with a butter knife.
-
Sprinkle with crushed candy canes.
-
Put the baking tray in the fridge for about 5 minutes to allow the bark to set.
-
Break the bark up into bite size-ish pieces and store in an airtight container.
Courtenay Hartford is the author of creeklinehouse.com, a blog based on her adventures renovating a 120-year-old farmhouse in rural Ontario, Canada. On her blog, Courtenay shares interior design tips based on her own farmhouse and her work as founder and stylist of the interior photography firm Art & Spaces. She also writes about her farmhouse garden, plant-based recipes, family travel, and homekeeping best practices. Courtenay is the author of the book The Cleaning Ninja and has been featured in numerous magazines including Country Sampler Farmhouse Style, Better Homes and Gardens, Parents Magazine, Real Simple, and Our Homes.