Easy Homemade Butter Mints

Our whole family loves butter mints, which are a nice treat especially after a meal at a restaurant.  Homemade candies often scare me when it comes to things like heating to a precise temperature, but these butter ints do not require any cooking, candy thermometers, or other complicated steps.  This is also a recipe that the kids can participate in.

Ingredients

1/4 cup butter, softened
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup sweetened condensed milk
3-1/4+ cups confectioner’s sugar
1/2 teaspoon peppermint extract
Food coloring

Directions

Most recipes I found for butter mints required the ingredients to be mixed in a mixer.  Although it was more work (a lot of elbow grease!), I mixed the ingredients by hand without a problem.  My arm was tired from mixing but my kids enjoyed helping stir until the mixture became too thick at the very end of the mixing process.

Start by mixing the softened butter and salt.  Add the sweetened condensed milk and the peppermint extract.

You can use other extracts in the place of peppermint, and you can also adjust the amount of extract to the strength you would like.  I recommend adding your extract carefully, and in moderation, since many extracts can be quite strong.

You can also add food coloring.  Without it, the mints will be a creamy, light color.  We had natural orange food coloring, and my kids decided they wanted the mints to be orange, so that’s what we used!  Probably not my top choice of color for a mint, but you can use whatever you like, even making ones for special occasions, whether it is green and red for Christmas, blue and pink for a baby shower, and so on.  I think it would also be fun to match colors and flavors – for example lemon and yellow or even make lavender “mints”.

Add in the confectioner’s sugar, cup by cup, mixing thoroughly.

You want your dough to not be sticky, so after mixing in your 3-1/4 cups, if your dough is sticky, continue to add confectioner’s sugar by the tablespoon until you have the right consistency.  I ended up using about 3-1/2 cups of confectioner’s sugar.

Take a small ball of dough and roll it out into a long, round tube.  My kids were able to participate in this part, and I gave them each a little silicone mat to do what they wanted with their dough, and they had a great time rolling their “edible playdough” into “snakes”.

I used a pizza cutter to efficiently cut the strips into pieces.

Allow your mints to dry on a cookie sheet, and then store in an airtight container.  I put our mints right on a non-stick cookie sheet and when they were dry, they did leave little sticky spots behind, so a piece of wax paper or silicone mat may be easier.  Our mints took over 24 hours to dry, but we started eating them right away because they were so good!