Old-Fashioned Butter Mints [ Pinterest again :) ]

These. Are. Yummy.

You can find what I found (through pinterest) here.

This is a no-bake, gluten-free recipe. (just in case you were wondering)

All you need is:

1/4 cup butter, softened
1/4 teaspoon salt
3 1/4 cups confectioners’ sugar plus 1/4 cup+, if needed
1/3 cup sweetened condensed milk
1/2 teaspoon peppermint extract*
food coloring, optional

Her instructions:
"To the bowl of stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, combine butter and salt and beat for 1 minute on medium-high speed. Add 3 1/4 cups confectioners’ sugar, milk, peppermint, and beat on medium-low speed until a dough forms. If the dough seems wet, add additional confectioners’ sugar until dough combines (I use 3 1/2 cups sugar). The dough will be crumbly but will come together when pinched and squeezed into a ball. "

You then divide the dough into quarters or thirds and add food coloring (if you so desire). After it's colored to your liking, you start rolling the dough into golf-ball-sized lumps. Then you roll them out into worm-like shapes (this part of her blog made me giggle, she makes funny playdough references) and cut them with a pizza cutter into bite-sized pieces.

Her instructions are very detailed and phenomenal, I highly recommend checking out her blog if you're planning on making these!

This recipe makes about 200 bite-sized mints.


My Experience

These mints are a lot of fun! I struggled with the recipe for only a couple of reasons. The first one was simply out of my control.

My stand-up mixer is wrapped in bags and in storage till our house is done. *sadface* I had to improvise and use a dough hook in my mom's old bread mixer. It just doesn't work quite the same, as you can see by the coloring in my mints.

I ended up doing a lot of the mixing by hand (which was no big deal, because I think it's fun), which turned my fingers a nifty shade of blue-green for a little bit.

The dough surprised me a little bit, but it is so cool! As you're mixing, it starts to look something like this:

and for half a second you start to panic thinking "There's no WAY this is right".

But then you grab a handful and compress it, and the stuff sticks together like magic. Seriously... we thought it was so cool that we had to play with it for a little bit before we got down to business.

The lil bro made a cowboy hat. It was cool. So we took a picture.

I read her instructions about the mint flavoring very carefully, then I spent probably 10 minutes trying to decide if I wanted just straight mint or peppermint. We eventually stuck with peppermint because that's what she called for in the original recipe.

I think next time I am going to half the dough before I add the mint, and try half with straight mint to see which one I like better.

My normally flawless measuring skills *chortle* failed me a bit, and I may have added just a touch more peppermint than it called for. (If  it was more, it was really only by one or two drops.) Everyone I gave one to said the end result was just fine; but, I secretly wanted them to be a little less minty... mainly so I could eat them like candy. I would recommend using less than she calls for, then tasting it to see where you want to go from there.

My only word of advice is this: She's not kidding when she says the dough can be a bit tricky to roll out. It crumbles almost as well as it compresses, so the first few times can get a little frustrating. we ended up squishing ours into long rectangular shapes instead of rolling the dough. It worked, but the mints weren't quite as pretty as hers.

The shapes started like this, which was cool until...

We realized that this was much more efficient.

My overall opinion? Yummy! (but a little too minty to be eaten like candy... which may or may not be a good thing... I haven't decided.)