Chocolate Peppermint Bars

Hello Everyone!!

This week's blog post is for these refreshingly cool Chocolate Peppermint Bars. The process of making these was quite similar to making caramel squares as they have the same three components; a biscuit base, filling and a melted chocolate top. The taste of these bars was reminiscent to After Eights and I thought they were delicious!

So let's get started...

Ingredients needed: 

• For the biscuit base: 55g butter
• 55g caster sugar
• 115g plain flour
• some milk
• For the peppermint filling: 175g icing sugar
• 2-4 tbsp warm water
• Half a tsp peppermint extract
• Green/mint food colouring (optional)
• For the top: 175g plain chocolate

Equipment needed:

• Weighing scales
• KitchenAid
• Spoon
• Baking tray
• Fork
• Bowl for the icing 
• Bowl for melting the chocolate

I used a 7x7inch tray so my biscuit base was thin and crisp. If you use a tray any bigger you may have difficulty stretching the dough all the way to the edges.

1. The first step is to preheat your oven to 180°C/ gas mark 4.

2. Next place your butter and sugar into a bowl and beat until light and fluffy.

3. When your butter and sugar has combined you can add your flour and mix again. If your mixture isn't coming together, feel free to add a couple drops of milk to help it form a dough.

4. Once your mixture has formed a dough, take it out of the bowl and roll it into a ball with your hands to form a smooth dough.

5. Place the dough into your tray and press it down until it evenly covers the whole tray.

6. Prick the dough with a fork to allow the steam to escape while baking.

7. Pop into the oven for 10-15 minutes until it is lightly golden brown and firm to touch.

Step 2

Step 3

Step 6

After being in the oven

When your biscuit base has been removed from the oven and has begun cooling you can start making your filling/icing.

1. Simply mix your icing sugar and water in a bowl until it is a semi-thick consistency.

2. At this stage you can add some food colouring to make your icing a light green colour or leave it plain white. I chose to add a tiny bit of ProGel food colouring in 'Aqua'.

3. You can now pour this icing onto the biscuit base (make sure it's completely cooled!) and put into the fridge for about 20 minutes to allow the icing to set.

 After my icing had been setting for a while I melted my chocolate. I only had dark chocolate chips in my house at the time and unfortunately they had a very high percentage of cocoa solids so they were quite bitter. To combat this problem I used about 150g milk chocolate chips and 25g of the dark chocolate chips. I didn't use all milk chocolate as I didn't want the bars to be too sweet.

 After melting the chocolate you can go ahead and spread it on top of the icing and leave to set again.
I left mine in the fridge and about 40 minutes later it was solid enough to cut. 

 When the chocolate is set you can remove the bars from the tray and cut. I cut skinny strips and then cut each strip in half to make my bars.
And you're finished!

 These bars had a really nice minty taste that was complimented beautifully with the dark chocolate. The biscuit base also added a nice crisp texture to the bars.

Thanks for reading this week's post, I hope you enjoyed and I'll be back next week :)