This Christmas Bark makes for a wonderful homemade holiday gift. Who wouldn’t love the gift of chocolate for Christmas or the New Year?!

Ingredients

To make this Christmas bark, you’ll need:

While most of us just call this toffee, others may call it English toffee or butter toffee. It’s super buttery with a nice crunch – not too hard to bite into and not overly sticky.

Ingredients and Equipment

The good news is that you don’t need to buy anything fancy to make toffee; you may even have everything you need in your house already:

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to visit the amazing kitchens at Kakao Chocolate and to play at being a chocolatier for a day. This meant that I got to eat all of the chocolate that I wanted all day long – hello, sugar high!

One of the coolest things that these chocolate magicians taught me was how to make chocolate leaves. I’m excited to be able to share that with you!

How to Make Candied Orange Slices

1. Wash your oranges really well and slice the oranges into thin circle slices. Set aside the end pieces or any other pieces that don’t look that pretty.
2. Boil the orange slices with sugar and spices. I like using cinnamon sticks, but you can also add whole cloves, nutmeg, and/or allspice. Squeeze the juice from any of the pieces you set aside into the boiling sugar water for extra flavor.
3. Simmer for about forty minutes, rotating occasionally.
4. Using tongs, transfer candied slices to a cooling rack. (To keep your counter clean, put a paper towel under the rack.) Save the orange syrup left in the pot to use on pancakes or anywhere else you would use orange sauce.
5. As soon as the orange slices are cool, transfer them to parchment paper. If you leave them on the cooling rack too long, it will be hard to remove them.

Chewy vs. Crispy Orange Slices

To make candied orange slices crispy, use a dehydrator to dehydrate them after they are done – just like when you make crispy apple chips.

What Are Pixie Sticks?

Pixie sticks (the store-bought ones are sold as Pixy Stix [paid link]) are a powdered sugary candy served in straws.

It’s a brittle-like candy made by heating sesame seeds and a sweetener together, pouring the mixture onto a baking sheet, and baking. Once it’s cool, you break it up into chunks.

What Is Tempered Chocolate?

Simply, it’s chocolate that has been heated and cooled in just the right way to produce smooth, shiny chocolate with a good snap.

From a not-so-simple chemistry perspective, cocoa butter molecules in tempered chocolate are lined up to make only form-5 beta crystals. Other crystal forms yield chocolate with an unpleasant mouth feel and rough texture, and we eliminate those when we properly temper chocolate.

This recipe was taken (with permission) right out of the book Sally’s Candy Addiction [paid link]. Sally McKenny, the author and blogger behind Sally’s Baking Addiction, created this fantastic book that’s a treasure trove of recipes for any candy lover. I found her caramel recipe incredibly approachable and perfect for these turtle candies.

Caramel apples can be tricky. Sometimes, the caramel can be jaw-breakingly hard (like candy apples).

I love teaching home bakers about simple tricks that professional pastry chefs use to make cakes look amazing (like decorating cakes with edible flowers). Using isomalt, you can create dazzling decorations for your desserts.

Pastry Chef Tyler Davis, formerly of The Chocolate Pig in St. Louis, worked with me on a Q&A to get you started using this super fun sugar alcohol to create decorations that will be sure to impress your friends and family. The information in this post is based on my interview with him. (You can also watch the full video interview toward the end of the post.)