How to Make Chocolate 'Shards'

In my case, I'm not sure 'shards' is quite the right term - it was my intention to do this, but in the end (as I was making these as Christmas presents for 24 people!) I wanted to make sure everyone got to try each flavour, so I cut them into rather boring squares!! I would have preferred to have just snapped the blocks up into pretty shards but it just wasn't practical!

What You'll Need

Chocolate (I used milk, plain and dark in varying quantities - most of my trays had around 500g chocolate in total)

Sprinkly Bits of your choice - think dried fruit, nuts, you could use sweets - I added some chilli flakes

Baking Tray

Greaseproof paper

A means to melt chocolate (double boiler or microwave)

Spoon

Fridge

Method
Line a baking tray with greaseproof paper

Melt your chocolate (melt each colour separately).

If you're using the microwave, do this in 30 second blasts - burnt chocolate is NOT good.. If over a double boiler, make sure you don't get water in the chocolate and don't let the water boil. In both cases, it's good practice to remove the chocolate from the heat before it's 100% melted - if you stir the last few lumps, they will melt with the heat from the bowl/melted chocolate and you avoid over heating which causes all sorts of problems.

Next, pour your main chocolate (in my case, the milk chocolate) onto the baking tray and use your spoon to spread this evenly over the tray.

Add your secondary flavour chocolate (in the below picture, this was white) on top - I put it all down the centre as I was only using two colours. Where I used three flavours, I made stripes all over the place.

Use your spoon to make swirls in the melted chocolate and to marble the two colours up. 

Next, add any sprinkly bits to the top that you want - in these pictures, I used macadamia nuts and dried cranberries to give it a Christmas feel and some colour and crunch. 

Put the tray into the fridge to set. If you're making random shards, simply remove it once hard and break it into pieces. If you're being more orderly like me, remove it from the fridge when it is solid, but not rock hard and use a sharp knife to cut it into piece before returning to the fridge to harden up before wrapping.

In terms of flavour combinations, there are lots you could try. I did the following:

Milk and Dark Chocolate with Chilli flakes

Milk, White and Dark chocolate on it's own (see below) along with a Milk, White and Dark Chocolate with chopped dried tropical fruit and coconut.

To package these up, simply wrap in cellophane or put into sandwich type bags and tie with a pretty ribbon.