Chocolate Peppermint Bark... fail :(

I love the kind of dessert called barks. OK, so they're just melted chocolate with additional candy, but that's what makes them so great!

I wanted to make this instructibles recipe for Chocolate Peppermint Bark, 

but...

 we couldn't find candy canes or those round, hard, white and red peppermint candies with the pinwheel design on them either. It can also be really tough to find specialty item like melting chocolate here (I'm in North Germany, and they just don't have huge super markets like they do in the US).

 We were able to find soft peppermint candies, and I had a bottle of Monin's Peppermint syrup I've been adding to my hot chocolate. I figured that instead of chopping up more of the soft pepper mint candies, I could add the syrup to the chocolate directly. Since I wasn't using melting chocolate, I thought the chocolate might solidify really quickly and I wouldn't be able to pour it properly. I was going to melt the chocolate in the microwave, add the syrup, melt it a little more and pour it.

That was the plan, anyway.

The chocolate melted beautifully, but after adding the peppermint syrup the chocolate dried out. I have no idea what happened, how adding liquid to liquid made a solid, but there was a phase change and it turned into a powder.

Alchemy!!!

So in an attempt to salvage the bark, I put my surprise cocoa powder in the bottom of my baking parchment lined dish, and placed the white chocolate on top of it. I wasn't completely sure if adding the syrup changed the constancy of the chocolate or if heating it up and then cooling it rapidly by stirring it did, so I didn't want to risk the same thing happening to the white chocolate. I broke the bar up into pieces, placed them on top of the minty milk chocolate powder, and microwaved the whole thing. I was hoping the white chocolate could cement the powder in place, and it sort of did. I was able to spread the white chocolate out evenly with a fork and sprinkled my peppermint pieces on top.

I had to leave it overnight for the white chocolate to turn solid, which makes me think that it was the syrup that made the milk chocolate turn into powder rather than that being a part of the cooling process.

The result tastes good but is messy. It's difficult to get all the milk chocolate, and there's something off about the texture. I want to make it again, but I'll just add a layer of peppermint candy between the milk and white chocolate and leave the syrup out of it.