Holiday Cookie Bark

This week our baking group decided not to do anything formal because of the holiday Wednesday which is our posting day.  In reading the cooking blogs I follow I found a few ideas for holiday themed treats.  This one looked (and is) super easy.  The longest task was probably sorting through a bag of M&M's to get just the red and blue ones! 

I got the recipe from here.  It's really more of a method than a recipe.  I assumed that she used a standard size cookie sheet, so when I made mine on a half sheet pan I figured I was probably making about 1-1/2 times the amount she was making. 

I started by cutting up about 18 double stuff oreos.  If I make it again I'll use regular.  You really want the cookie part to cut the richness of the white chocolate.

You're probably wondering why I didn't just crush the Oreos... When you crush them in a plastic bag you end up with all the cream filling (or too much for my taste) smashed on the inside of the bag.  Then the best part is left behind!  So I took the time to cut them.  But as I said before you don't really need the cream in this recipe so I could have just smashed them with a rolling pin. 

Next I spread the cookies and pretzels (the recipe calls for stick but I think you could use any shape) in my sheet pan.  The key for the pretzels is again to break up the sweetness of the white chocolate, so I think it would taste just as good or better (depending on you taste) if you used some kind of nut instead of pretzels.

I put wax paper down and since it just slid around I taped the edges to the pan.  I only put down the wax paper because I thought the the white chocolate wouldn't come up off the pan very well.  I was afraid I'd end up with crumbles instead of pieces. 

The recipe calls for vanilla melts or almond bark but the Wal-mart I shopped at this weekend didn't have either of those.  It was such a pathetic Wal-mart.  It was the biggest Wal-mart I've ever seen but it had the smallest grocery section.  They didn't even have any avocados! 

Luckily they did have Baker's White Chocolate.  Since I thought I was making 1.5 as much I used 1-1/2 lbs of white chocolate instead of 1 lb. 

The second longest step was melting the chocolate.  I thought about using the microwave but decided to go with the double boiler method. 

It probably took me close to 10 minutes to melt it completly.  But it melted nice and evenly over the boiling water.  Next time I really need to get a bowl that's a little bigger than the pot I use.  It was a bit of a struggle to get the bowl off the pot wearing pot holders so I didn't burn myself.

Once it was completely melted I dumped it over the pretezels and cookie pieces.  At this point I still was worried that I didn't have enough chocolate, but I just kept mixing until I had chocolate on all the cookies and pretzels and it basically all in one piece and the same thickness.

Then I sprinkled the red and blue M&M's on wet white chocolate.  For asthetic purposes next time I would split the red from the blue M&M's so it's easier to get a nice balance of the two colors.  There are a lot more blues then reds.  The last step was the sprinkles.  This was one place where Wal-mart did a pretty good job.

They had this fun little jar of sprinkles with different colors, one of which was all red, white and blue.  That was nice.  I was pretty liberal with the sprinkles.

This is one of those dishes that could drive a person like me crazy.  Even looking at this picture right now I'm wishing I had put more M&M's in the lower right corner and that I had dug out more red ones.  It's just not very balances.  Is that the right word?  Anyway...

After about an hour in the frig the Cookie Bark is all ready!  When I tried to break it and couldn't that was my first clue that I had used more chocolate than I needed.

I had to cut the pieces.  You can see I didn't make it very far before I had to have a taste!  It was very sweet.  It was a surprise to me that after one piece I didn't want another.  It was too... rich was the first word that came to mind but that's not right... I love rich things.  It's too sweet.  It also helped me realize that I did use more chocolate than I needed.  It really doesn't take much white chocolate to hold the stuff together. 

So here's what I've worked out for a recipe.  Like I said this is a method so you can mix up the ingredients to get the colors for any holiday.  The blog that I got this from has ideas for Halloween, Christmas, Valentine's Day, and, Easter.  So you really can mix it up and do this with any combination of ingredients that sounds good to you.  I would just recommend you have a salty and a sweet.

Have a Happy Fourth!!