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This homemade peppermint bark, luscious with white and semi-sweet chocolate and a smattering of crushed peppermint candy might be the easiest homemade gift ever.

After making my peppermint bark brownie cookies, it occurred to me that you could probably make homemade chocolate bark for so much cheaper. I also love having a no-bake option in my Christmas cookie list. When you’re baking several varieties of cookies in a short time, a no-bake like peppermint bark can free up oven space.

So let’s start saving time and money and melt some chocolate up into chocolate bark.

hand holding piece of peppermint bark among pieces of peppermint bark

Homemade peppermint bark

pieces of peppermint bark with text overlay

Why you should make a batch of peppermint chocolate bark

So much cheaper: Get a cute tin from the thrift store and fill it up with your own homemade peppermint bark, and you’ll miss the candy store price.
Customizable: You can choose to make white and dark chocolate bark, or one or the other if you’d prefer. If you want to swirl the chocolates together, you can do that. And if you’d like to use a candy besides peppermint, you can do that too. Bark is an idea more than a recipe.
Bag it up: This really is almost an instant gift. Buy some cute cellophane bags, and you can line up rows and rows of peppermint bark for teacher gifts, Secret Santa, or friends and neighbors alike.

sprinkling candy canes on white chocolate

Ingredients for homemade peppermint bark

Chocolate: I listed semi-sweet chocolate chips in the ingredients because they’re easy to find. I have other thoughts below on other choices.
White chocolate: Pick a good one. Ghiradelli is pretty easy to find and consistently tasty. Guittard and Lindt also make good white chocolate. Green and Black white chocolate is probably my favorite, though it’s more spendy. The longer I bake, the more money I seem to spend on chocolate; it’s like my ability in a fabric store to automatically zero in on the nicest bolt of fabric…I digress.
Peppermint candy: Candy canes crush the nicest, but use what you have/can find. With all this talk of getting red dyes out of our food, I’ve wondered if there are good dye-free candy canes. Turns out the answer is yes: Yum Earth candy canes.

How to customize your peppermint bark

Change up your chocolate: As a lover of dark chocolate, I love this bark with Lindt 70% or even Lindt 85%. Use your favorite chocolate though; milk chocolate is delicious, semi-sweet etc. If you can’t find good white chocolate, candy melts or almond bark are another alternative.
Swap out the candy: Candy canes are so much more interesting now than when I was a kid. You can get just about any color under the sun and more flavors than just peppermint. Wintergreen is good, but if you come across a flavor that sounds like it will taste good with chocolate, give it a try. Taste it first though; while blue raspberry and butterscotch sound pretty awesome, I can’t advocate for bubble gum flavored bark. That definitely sounds gross.

Tips for making peppermint bark

adding chocolate chips to melted chocolate

spreading white chocolate on dark chocolate with spatula

Easy tempering: I’ve found an easy way to get close to tempered chocolate is to melt half of the chocolate first. Once the first half is melted, add the rest of the chocolate in off heat, stirring to gradually melt the rest of the chocolate. This will lower the temperature of the chocolate such that there’s less of a chance of the chocolate “blooming”, ie getting that weird splotchy look to it. This simplified way of tempering the chocolate still gives you glossy chocolate with a good snap, but without too much fuss.
Let the chocolate set: While you could melt the chocolates at the same time, you’ll get a prettier bark if you let the dark chocolate set first.
Use a silicone mat: While you can use parchment paper, spreading the chocolate on a silicone mat makes easy work here. Once the chocolate is set, you can fold the mat up in random places. This helps to break the chocolate easily into irregular chunks without putting fingerprints on your shiny bark.

Homemade peppermint bark

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Author: Elizabeth Farr

Print Recipe

Description

Customizable homemade peppermint bark rich with your favorite white and dark chocolate and a smattering of festive candy cane pieces. Pack it up in a tin for an almost instant gift.

Ingredients

Scale

12 oz chocolate chips
12 oz white chocolate bars
4 oz peppermint candy (use canes, sticks, starlight mints, etc)

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Instructions

Line a sheet tray with a silicone mat that fits it, or line it with a piece of parchment. If you use parchment, spritz the pan lightly first with cooking spray so that the parchment doesn’t shift in the pan.
Fill a double boiler with about 1” of water and bring it to a boil over medium heat. When the water is boiling, lower the heat to its lowest setting.
Place about half the chocolate chips in the top of the double boiler. Place the chocolate over the hot water, stirring occasionally until it is melted completely.
Take the chocolate off the heat and add the rest of the chocolate chips to the melted chocolate. Stir occasionally until all of the chocolate is melted.
Use a large offset spatula to spread the melted chocolate in your prepared sheet tray. Do your best to spread the chocolate evenly, but know that you don’t have to do this perfectly.
Place the pan in the freezer for 5-10 minutes to set the chocolate. If the chocolate cracks, don’t worry about it.
Place the peppermint candy in a plastic bag. Whack the candy with a rolling pin to crush it into small pieces. Try to shoot for large sprinkle size and less peppermint dust as you’re crushing the candy.
Meanwhile fill a heatproof bowl with the white chocolate and place it over the hot water. If the water got cold when you took the dark chocolate off the heat, turn the heat back on to the lowest setting on your stove. White chocolate is much more sensitive to heat, so you never want to melt white chocolate over a high temperature.
Stir the white chocolate occasionally until it melts completely. Set the bowl back over the hot water for a few seconds at a time to keep it melting.
Spread the white chocolate over the set dark chocolate in a thin layer. You decide if you want it to be drizzled over or if you want to make stripes of white chocolate. Both look great!
Once you’ve topped the dark chocolate with the white chocolate, scatter the candy cane pieces over the white chocolate.
Place the pan back in the freezer until both chocolates are completely set.
When the tray is set, peel back the silicone mat (or parchment) from the bark. Break the bark into irregular pieces. Package up the bark in jars, decorative bags or in tins. Store the bark separate from any other treats as the peppermint flavor can leach into other cookies, making them taste like peppermint.