Customize DIY Chocolate Bars For The Ultimate Gift

Do you love surprising your friends and family with do-it-yourself treats or baked goods? If you're a home chef or baker, you probably have used those skills to your advantage when birthdays or holidays roll around. Honestly, who doesn't love getting a homemade sweet treat from a friend? One confection you may not have thought would be super easy to make yourself is the classic chocolate bar.

Making customized chocolate bars in your kitchen is actually really easy. All you need is a mold, chocolate, and whatever extra bits and goodies you want to add to make it special. Chocolate molds can be purchased online or in stores like Michaels and they come in plenty of unique shapes and sizes. The flavor of the bar is fully up to you; customize it to match what your friends and family like. You could use white chocolate and crushed Oreo cookies for a copycat Hershey's Cookies 'n' Cream bar. Or you could use dark chocolate and swirl in Nutella and hazelnut bits for a crunchy, nutty twist. You can even customize your bars to match a holiday or special occasion with themed sprinkles — like skulls for Halloween or festive trees for Christmas time.

In theory, you can use any chocolate to make your custom chocolate bar. If you really want your chocolate to shine and snap like a real candy bar, however, tempering your chocolate could be the way to go. While tempering chocolate is a time-consuming process, you can do it at home if you have the right tools and a positive mindset.

Tempering chocolate requires melting and then cooling the chocolate to very specific temperatures. The process works best with more chocolate, so hopefully you've got enough chocolate bar molds to handle it all. Tempering chocolate is one of the best times to use a double boiler, which is basically a heat-safe bowl set over a pot with simmering water. Exactly ⅔ of your chocolate of choice needs to be melted in the double boiler to a maximum temperature of 120 degrees F for dark chocolate and 105 degrees F for milk or white chocolate. Add the rest of your chocolate, remove from heat, and cool to 82 degrees F. The final step is to reheat again — to either 90 or 86 degrees F, depending on the type of chocolate. At that point, your chocolate is ready to be poured into molds and used to make candy bars your friends and family will love. If you're feeling extra creative, you can even wrap up your finished bars in food-safe ribbon or paper to make them look extra beautiful before you give them away.