A festive Valentine’s Day snack, white chocolate sweet hearts bark will satisfy sweet cravings with hunks and chunks of white chocolate covered in conversation hearts and heart sprinkles. You can safely say this food’s main ingredient is love.
Sweetheart White Chocolate Bark
Ingredients
- 1 package of Wilton White Candy Melts
- 3 Brach’s Tropical Fruit Conversation Hearts Valentines 3 – 21 g boxes
- Sprinkles
Instructions
- Pour white chocolate melts into a bowl and microwave 30 seconds.
- Stir, and microwave another 30 seconds
- Repeat until it's smooth and creamy with no chunks. Keep in mind the longer you stir, you are slowing melting some of the chocolate in the heat of the melted chocolate. So stir for a good 30 seconds before putting back in the microwave. This process usually took a minute for these melts, though sometimes a minute and a half. But like the strawberry flavored melts took a little longer than the others.
- Dump melted chocolate somewhere. I used a 9 x 9 baking pan, totally forgetting to grease it at all, and it worked fine though a little dangerous with the removal. In retrospect, I would have first, at the very least, greased that pan with a little bit of vegetable shortening. BUT I think I'd be most inclined to dump it on parchment paper all flat like (no real need for a baking pan unless you want super thick edges which are harder to cut or break). But even if you wanted a baking pan to help with the edges, you could grease the pan AND lay some parchment paper on the bottom.
- Chill in the fridge until the chocolate hardens (maybe 2 hours, but leaving it over night is pretty sure fire).
- Once hardened, break up the chocolate into pieces / chunks. If you want the chunked look I got, I waited until it was completely hard, and because I'm the dolt who forgot to grease the pan, it came out much like trying to scrape a sheet of ice from a leak in the freezer. You just start cutting into a piece not far from the edge and it will eventually pop a chunk. Then continue. But that was a lot of work. And somewhat dangerous. Albeit therapeutic. But I can't help but to think if you did that on parchment paper, somewhat thinner pieces of chocolate, that it wouldn't just break with your hands. But another option might be is if you get it early on, before the chocolate fully hardens but hardens enough, you might be able to cut into it rather easily to get a more controlled shape. And if you do grease the pan and can get the chocolate sheet to remove entirely, you could potentially THEN (after removal from the pan, not before) smash it with a hammer, but that could be cartoon logic.
Where did I get this recipe?
Chocolate bark is hardly an original concept, and there really isn’t much to it; however, I admit coming across the idea at first glance, I wouldn’t know any details or what nots. Plus, coming across the idea at first glance…
So basically, I wanted to come up with ideas for Valentine’s Day Charcuterie board, but of sweets. I needed filler foods from the main things I was making. I wanted something that was a no fuss thing because, first of all, I was making some fuss things, and second, my main thing with this blog is to have super easy, no fuss recipes for those days we got to perform as a mom but lack the energy, time or spoons.
Looking through Pinterest for ideas, I saw something I thought was chocolate bark. It was pretty. I clicked on it to find out it’s COOKIE bark, but still loved the way it looked so I did basically the same concept, but with white chocolate instead of cookie.
Ingredients for White Chocolate Bark
- White Chocolate Wafers
- Conversation Sweethearts
- Sprinkles
Really, with chocolate bark, you can put anything you want that’s edible on top of it. I went festive for Valentine’s Day. A lot of the more popular recipes tend to go a little crunchy with trail mix type ingredients like nuts and dried fruits. Some people use flower petals. But whatever they have in the seasonal aisle at the Walmart and Dollar General might make good toppings for that seasonal festive vibe thing. So next up is St. Patty’s Day, and for that, this might work well with some Lucky Charms cereal, and maybe some crushed green candy of some sort to give it a fruity flavor.
Process
For the most part, you want to
- Melt the chocolate
- Smear it across something flat
- Add some shit to the top of it
- Wait for it to harden completely
- Break it up into pieces
Melting the Chocolate
The easiest way to melt white chocolate (or any chocolate) is the microwave. I usually microwave in a microwave safe container for 30 seconds at a time, and then stir in between for about 30 seconds at a time.
Another method is to do that thing where you have one pot boiling water, and then you have a pot on top of it with chocolate in it. The reason they do that is because it can burn to the pan if you try to melt it over direct heat. You can kind of get away with that if you are adding a bunch of other ingredients.
For chocolate bark, you can use hot super melty chocolate. When dealing with chocolate generally, you want to wait until it hits room temperature to work with it, so that it’s not too thin but still thin enough to work with. But with this, nope you can slap happily slop it out as long as its melted.
Smearing the Chocolate
I ignorantly dumped mine into a glass baking pan without greasing it. It was some work to get it out. And I’m not a fan of unnecessary work. But it still came out, and it tastes good.
However, I think the best method is to smear it over parchment paper with a rubber spatula, and then peel it off and break by hand like what was done here: Easy Chocolate Bark Recipe by Cookie & Kate.
But if you are going to use a baking pan (maybe you want it thicker?), you may want to grease the pan first with a super thin layer of shortening. In theory, it would come off the pan faster (maybe almost in one piece), and then you can break it with your hands. Because slicing thick chocolate is effort.
Adding Some Sprinkles
Top it with anything that sounds good to go with chocolate.
In this case here, for Valentines day, I went with conversation hearts. I really wanted the pastel aesthetic, but I didn’t have pastel sprinkles. But it still looks festive and pretty with the red hearts.
I also have been munching pretty hard eating a small chunk of this with pretzels that it might of been a good idea to mix pretzel pieces into the chocolate before dumping it.
But all you have to do is sprinkle the sprinkles (or nuts, or crushed candy, or cereal, or whatever) to the top, and you maybe want to use your hand / fingers to lightly push it into the chocolate.
Hardening and breaking it…
The chocolate will harden faster in the fridge, but it will harden at room temp.
For most people, they usually wait until it’s completely hard, no softy chocolate pieces, to break it into chunks. That really gives the chunk look to the finished product. Ideally, you can break it by hand, or you can do the popping of the chunks with a knife method I used.
But for some, I think they might wait for it to harden just a little, enough to where you can slice it easier but it will still hold form after you slice it, and then slice it into triangles to get that more sharper, cleaner look. This would also be more ideal with a thinner bark.
There really are no hard rules with making chocolate bark, and it’s a painless snack for festive seasonal things we got to to do for the kids to help get them excited about holidays.
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