Photos © 2009 David Mandel // Ampersand Industries

There is a candy that comes but once a year. This candy perfectly combines the crisp cool of the blustery cold weather with the dark warmth of nights spent at home; it is at once shatteringly crisp and puddlingly melty. Peppermint bark. No, not that sickly sweet white chocolate stuff studded with tiny suggestions of peppermint. This is chocolate to the menthe power. Dark, bittersweet chocolate infused with mint, laminated to a thin layer of white chocolate made crisp by the presence of gobs of pulverized peppermints.

The gold standard for this holiday treat is, in my opinion, the stuff sold at Williams-Sonoma each year. It goes on display there around Thanksgiving each year, and if you stop in during the month of December there are often samples to lure you to this confectionary crack. I first tried it, reluctantly, a few years ago--I have never liked white chocolate, and I was sure I would dislike this, too. Non alors! I was smitten from the get-go. As in, I must have circled the display ten or more times, shameless in my desire for more, MORE! And then I saw the price tag. Twenty-five dollars or something. And there is where pride peeked out from its hiding place and shook its head at me. There was no way I was spending twenty-five dollars on candy that I would have no intentions of sharing.

So each year during the holidays I venture out once or twice to W-S with my dignity firmly in check and gobble up all the free candy I can get my hands on. And since I started my new job in September, the store is a three-minute walk from my office. Danger. So this year I decided that enough was enough. I was tired of foraging it for 1/2-inch pieces. I would make my own. (Cue foreboding music.)

Given that I worked (in what seems now like a former life) as a line and pastry cook, I had some inkling of what I was up against. Which is to say, I knew that I would need to learn to temper chocolate,* but not how to do it. The Internet and my  cookbooks are awash in explanations of the process—these range from the breezily oversimplified (I'm looking at you Claudia Fleming!) to the mind-bogglingly precise. Most methods provide precise degree measurements for each stage of the process. And many methods include an explanation of the crystal formation process cribbed and shortened from Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking.** The bad news is that no method is foolproof and sometimes chocolate simply doesn't temper properly. The good news is that in chocolate, as in life, you can always (or almost always) start again.

After a day of gathering ingredients—Callebaut bittersweet chocolate, El Rey white chocolate fèves, peppermint oil, and starlight mints—I settled on this method. Like most others, it relies on a comfortingly precise set of temperature targets that must be reached to arrive at perfectly tempered chocolate; these are the temperatures, roughly, of summer days in Phoenix, Des Moines, and Philadelphia, respectively. I broke out my handy-dandy candy thermometer only to learn that it does not register temperatures within 100 degrees of those temperatures. Is chocolate not candy?! Well, yes, but it is it's own special something. Chocolate aficionado David Lebovitz recommends this thermometer made just for chocolate, but I couldn't find that one here, so I got one like this. (If you are asking yourself whether this defeats the cost-savings I intended by making my own, you are clearly operating on reason and logic, which, as has been previously documented, went out the window here some time ago and is of no use to me.)

I gathered up my nerve to begin this afternoon while my husband and son were out at a Christmas parade. I cleared my kitchen of all sources of moisture,*** took out my hostilities on some unsuspecting peppermint candies with a rolling pin, and chopped a 1 lb block of chocolate until my hands were covered in brown goo. And I set up two double-boilers--one for each of the chocolates. Not until I'd clipped my thermometer in and begun melting the dark chocolate did I realize, um, I still only had one working thermometer. (Well, if you don't count my instant read meat thermometer. Which I didn't. Because...ew.) Now I was committed, so I had to decide what to do. I figured that if I heated the white chocolate in tandem with the dark, I could have a pretty good idea of the temperature of the white chocolate based on that of the dark. Alone in my kitchen, I didn't hear a chorus of better ideas, so I forged ahead, stirring and stirring and stirring. Once all the chocolate was melted, I added the peppermint oil to both the white and dark chocolate and said a little prayer that neither would seize in the presence of this foreign liquid. So far so good.

Now, getting the chocolate down to the right temperature after it was melted took FOREVER. I think that was because I melted it in an old double boiler with a heavy ceramic insert that retained a lot of residual heat. Still. That was a lot of stirring. A lot.

Finally, with the chocolate cooled off, I put it back onto the simmering water in ten second increments. The thermometer clicked into the ideal range for tempered chocolate after a minute or so. I poured about half of what I'd tempered onto a piece of parchment and spread it out with an offset spatula. I set the kitchen timer for five minutes (an arbitrarily determined interval to which I was determined to adhere) and waited, anxiously stirring my white chocolate. At the end of the five minutes, I spread roughly the same amount of white chocolate on top of the dark and sprinkled the candy bits on top.

By this time, I'd been on my feet for a couple of hours, and I was ready to sit down. But I still had half a pound of (theoretically) tempered chocolate waiting to be used for...something. But what? I had not planned for this. I had no honey-colored shards of toffee to enrobe, no strawberries or apricots to dip. But tempered chocolate waits for no woman. If the temperature drops below a certain point, you've got to start all over. So I kept stirring both bowls to maintain their temperature for nearly 30 minutes. And then I realized this was for the birds. My bark was starting to set up, and I was feeling rather tough and decisive. I thought for a minute, and then I glopped a puddle of heavy cream into each bowl to make ganache. And with that, shiny, smooth chocolate turned to a grainy lump that had to be stirred and worked into submission for a good while. Moisture is the enemy of chocolate. Unless you mean to add it.

Having now been bold enough to dump cream into my hard-won tempered chocolate, I was feeling up for testing the results of my bark. I peeled a corner of the parchment away from the edge of the candy, and—SNAP—a perfect piece broke off cleanly in my hand; the two chocolates remained laminated to each other, and the peppermint dust stayed mostly in place. I took a bite. It had a satisfying smoothness and good (but not perfect) peppermint flavor. A victory! Or was it?

I had a little time before my boys got home to reflect on this little adventure. Once I bought all the chocolate (and the new thermometer), my candy had cost as much or more than what I could have bought at the store. Had it really been worth it?

***

Chocolate is fussy stuff. We often take for granted the complicated process that turns a bitter, alkaline plant pod into a smooth, sweet creamy indulgence. Even a mediocre chocolate bar is a feat of chemistry. And while tempering chocolate to the perfect consistency may be delicate work, even the humblest of cooks can add a chocolate chip to eggs, flour, butter, and sugar and arrive at something close to transcendence. Chocolate lends its richness to sweets and savories, alike. And, even after it has been ruined by the addition of liquid, it can be revived for a new purpose. It is an endlessly adaptable substance.

Not unlike people.

***

Eight years ago this December, my boyfriend (who is now my husband) and I set off on a cross-country trip from LA to our hometown in South Carolina, where he had a short-term gig lined up. I was emotionally and professionally adrift—my bread-and-butter consulting work had dried up in the wake of 9/11, and I the kitchen job that had once seemed like a dream now felt like a dead end. I was bouncing from big idea to big idea, never really latching on to anything that felt right. I would go to culinary school. No, wait! We would move to New York, and I would be a writer. I would go to graduate school. Or... I had no idea. Or, more precisely, I was nothing but ideas. A bundle of wasted potential. (Being a lawyer hadn't been on my radar in years and wouldn't be for a few more.) I felt out of balance, always changing my focus to keep up. Each new wrinkle or challenge threatened to seize me with fear and indecision.

Now—a marriage, a baby, a diploma, and a few years later—I have a wonderful family, an interesting (sometimes, maybe, too interesting!) job, and pastimes about which I am passionate. More than at any other time in my life, things are in balance, my needs and obligations tempered against the rewards and joys of a life that fits me. It has been a slow process. And the commitment-phobe in me takes comfort in knowing that even this good fit need not be permanent, that like chocolate that goes out of temper, I can always start over on the project that is me and try again and again until I get it right.******

***

Dark Chocolate Peppermint Bark

1/2 lb high quality dark chocolate
1/2 lb high quality white chocolate****
2 T peppermint oil (not extract)*****
8 oz starlight candies, crushed

1. Melt each chocolate in a double boiler (or metal boll over a simmering water), taking care not to allow steam or any other moisture to get into the bowl. Add 1T of peppermint oil to each chocolate and stir to combine.
2. Temper the chocolates according to whichever method you prefer.
3. Spread the dark chocolate layer first.
4. Wait until the dark chocolate layer is beginning to set up and top with the white chocolate layer.
5. Sprinkle the crushed peppermint candies over the bark.
6. Allow to cool completely and break or cut into bite-sized pieces.

***

So. The question. Was it worth it? Oh, yes.

As I finished writing the second half of this post last night, I hit "Save." But nothing, not one of the thousand or so words I had just written, was saved. "Hysterical" is not an exaggerated description for my reaction. I seized. For nearly an hour I raged at my web host, whose customer service representative had blithely admonished me to save more frequently. And then capped it off with a punctuation smiley. I thought about trashing the whole thing. But I kept looking at the beautiful pictures my husband had taken. And I remembered. I remembered the two hours of quiet, focused contemplation I had spent earlier. And I remembered that in life, as in chocolate, you can almost always start over. And so I did.

*Tempered chocolate cools quickly at room temperature to a crisp, lustrous sheen; untempered chocolate will not set up properly at room temperature and will often develop bloom, in which the cocoa butter separates from the cocoa solids and leaves a dull grayish film on the surface of the chocolate. Not good.

**Do you cook? At all? If you do, I think you should have this book. I re-read it cover-to-cover once every couple of years, and every time I get something new out of it.

***Moisture is the scourge of chocolate--even a few drops of water in a vat of chocolate can cause it to seize up into a crumbly mess.

****A lot of the white chocolate that is sold in grocery stores is a yucky glop of artificial flavors, a little cocoa butter, and a lot of palm kernel oil. This stuff tastes yucky and will be difficult for the home cook to temper. Look for a chocolate with a high cocoa butter percentage.

*****Peppermint oil is just what it sounds like—the essential oils of the peppermint herb (sometimes diluted with another neutral oil). Peppermint extract is just peppermint flavor suspended in alcohol--the alcohol could make your chocolate seize and should be avoided.