Old-Fashioned Butter Mints

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Old-Fashioned Butter Mints — 💚❤️ These homemade butter mints require just 6 ingredients to make! This recipe makes a big batch, so you’ll have lots left over for gifting. 

Old-Fashioned Butter Mints in two glass jars

Old-Fashioned Butter Mints Recipe

One of the highlights of going to my grandma’s house when I was growing up — in addition to playing Gin Rummy for money at age six — was raiding her candy dish. She used to have Jolly Ranchers, butterscotch candies, and after dinner mints in that little white dish with the lid. (When you’re six,”after dinner” means the minute you can get your sweaty little mitts on the mints, you do.)

I decided it was time to make my own homemade mints since I have such fond memories of them. 

These homemade butter mints are so smooth and just melt in your mouth.

Normally with mints, one is all you need. Maybe two. With these, you want at least 17 because they are cool yet sweet, firm yet melty. Plus they’re tiny.

It may not have been the brightest idea to make a recipe that needed to be sliced into 250 little pieces (just a guess) and I am not one for extra steps and monkey business and fussy recipes, but I rolled the dough into long skinny logs in between my hands and it felt like I was playing with Play-Doh.

You will never want a store-bought after buttercream mints again!

pink soft peppermint candy in glass jar

Ingredients for Butter Mints

To make these creamy, soft mints, you’ll need the following: 

  • Unsalted butter
  • Salt
  • Confectioner’s sugar
  • Sweetened condensed milk 
  • Peppermint extract
  • Food coloring

Note: Scroll down to the recipe card section of the post for the ingredients with amounts included and for more complete directions.

green after dinner mints in glass jar

How to Make Homemade Butter Mints

  1. Cream together the salt and butter for about a minute.
  2. Beat in the sweetened condensed milk, powdered sugar, and peppermint extract.
  3. Continue mixing until a dough forms, then remove the dough from the mixer and divide into one to four equal-sized balls. 
  4. Add one dough ball at a time back into the mixer and add your choice of food coloring to the dough. Mix until the color is uniform throughout. Wash the mixing bowl and paddle between each color change and repeat this process until each dough ball is colored. 
  5. To shape the butter mints, roll out a golf ball-sized piece of dough into a long rope and slice into bite-sized pieces.
green soft peppermint candy in glass jars

Recipe FAQs

Can I Use Another Kind of Mint Extract? 

Yes, you can use any variety of mint extract you prefer (i.e. mint, peppermint, spearmint, etc). These after dinner mints will be tasty no matter what type of mint extract you use. 

Just remember that mint extract cannot be undone and if you plan to make these, make sure you read my mint cautionary tales in the recipe section. You want to eat mints. Not eat a bottle of Listerine.

Can I Use Peppermint Essential Oil? 

I’ve only ever made this butter mints recipe using peppermint extract, so I can’t speak to whether or not (food grade!) peppermint essential oil will work here. 

Can I Use Another Flavor of Extract? 

I suspect this recipe would be nice with cinnamon extract, lemon or orange extract, or many other specialty flavored extracts from butter to rum to coconut to coffee extract. If you choose to use another specialty flavored extract, you’ll have to use your best judgement when flavoring these butter mints. 

Can I use different colors of food coloring?

I used red and green food coloring, but you could make these for Easter, Mother’s Day, a baby or bridal shower and use pastels. The un-dyed dough is stark white and a blank canvas.

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4.39 from 83 votes

Old-Fashioned Butter Mints

By Averie Sunshine
These old-fashioned butter mints require just 6 ingredients to make! This recipe makes a big batch, so you'll have lots left over for gifting.
Prep Time: 20 minutes
Total Time: 20 minutes
Servings: 200 mints
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Ingredients 

  • ¼ cup butter, softened (I used unsalted, but salted may be substituted based on preference)
  • ¼ teaspoon salt, consider omitting if you used salted butter
  • 3 ¼ cups confectioners’ sugar plus 1/4 cup+, if needed
  • cup sweetened condensed milk
  • ½ teaspoon peppermint extract*
  • food coloring, optional

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.
  • Taste the batter. If you want a more intense mint flavor, add additional mint extract, to taste (see note below).
  • Remove dough from the mixer, separate it into 1 to 4 smaller balls, and add one ball back into the mixer. Add the food coloring of your choice to the ball by squirting the droplets on top of the dough (careful when you turn on the mixer), and paddle on low speed until coloring is well-blended. Coloring will not blend completely into each and every speck of dough if examined extremely closely, but overall, mix until color is uniform. (I separated approximately two-thirds of the dough and made it green using about 15 drops green food coloring and made one-third of the dough red-pink by using about 7 drops red food coloring).
  • Wash the mixing bowl and the paddle in between each color change and repeat until all the balls are colored.
  • After the dough has been colored, either wrap it with plastic wrap and place it in an airtight container in the refrigerator to be rolled out later or roll it immediately.
  • To shape the butter mints, place a golf-ball sized amount of dough in your hands and roll dough into long thin cylinders about 1 centimeter wide. Place cylinders on countertop and with a pizza cutter (or knife – be careful of your counter), slice cylinders into bite-sized pieces, approximately 1 centimeter long.
  • Store mints in an airtight container in the refrigerator where they will keep for many weeks.

Notes

*A few notes about mint extracts: They are much more intensely flavored and potent than vanilla extract; 1 teaspoon of mint extract has an extreme amount of potency compared with 1 teaspoon vanilla extract. You cannot un-do mint once added so be very, very careful to not over-do it and end up with a bottle of Listerine-tasting food.
There are different kinds of mint extracts available and are labeled as “mint, “peppermint”, “spearmint” and more. For this recipe I used store-brand (Kroger/Ralph’s) “peppermint extract” sold in a small 1 ounce bottle. Select the version of “mint” you think sounds best as not all types are available in all areas.
Recipe variations and thoughts: I suspect this recipe would be nice with cinnamon extract, lemon or orange extract, or many other specialty-flavored extracts from butter to rum to coconut to coffee extract.
I have not tried making the dough first into a ball and then adding the extract after the dough has combined, thereby making it easier to customize the flavors from one big batch of mints into 50 pieces of orange, 50 pieces of cinnamon and so forth. Unfortunately, I have a feeling that extract added after the dough has combined would not disperse well and some pieces would be insanely strongly flavored and others would hardly be flavored at all. Working in an even smaller batch size is an option, although a bit challenging because less than one-quarter cup butter begins to be challenging.

Nutrition

Serving: 1, Calories: 11kcal, Carbohydrates: 2g, Cholesterol: 1mg, Sodium: 5mg, Sugar: 2g

Nutrition information is automatically calculated, so should only be used as an approximation.

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4.39 from 83 votes (77 ratings without comment)

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Please note: I have only made the recipe as written, and cannot give advice or predict what will happen if you change something. If you have a question regarding changing, altering, or making substitutions to the recipe, please check out the FAQ page for more info.

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Comments

  1. Quick question: Do you just let the mints sit out for a bit until they’re dry? I can’t wait to try these!!

    1. well after you roll them & form them into mints, they naturally just dry out. So even in a container in the fridge, they are pretty dry. Not sure if that’s what you mean but yes, they’re dry without “doing” anything special.

  2. I am so excited to try these! My kids and I love butter mints. We are staying on vacation here with my Grandmother. I think we will make some and fill up her little glass hen candy dish! I’d love to share this recipe and our results on my website, giving you link love of course! Thanks so much for sharing!

    1. I think they would last 3 months, yes.

      Do I think they would be at the height of freshness? No.

      Unless there is a reason why you’d purposely want to make them 3 months ahead of time, I would try to make them within 1 month of using them. Yes, I have some lingering around my fridge for a month+ but it’s not like I am serving it to company and I’m fine with that. With longterm food storage issues, it’s highly personal based on comfort levels and I hate to recommend exact storage times.

    1. Hi Mary, you’re SCREAMING!!! Guess you’re excited about the mints :)

      I discussed how long they’d last in the recipe section…many weeks.

  3. I use a recipe very similar to yours to make chocolate covered mints. Simply form your patties or balls (whatever shape you choose) and freeze them for at least 5-6 hours. Then dip in your melted chocolate. The mint holds up well and the cold helps set the chocolate faster. Refrigerate in an airtight container and the will keep for several weeks (if they don’t get eaten first!).

    1. Good to know…I actually was going to try this. Just freeze it very well first, then dip. Good to know it works just fine!

  4. I tried these butter mints and doctored the recipe a little. I used only 3 cups of pwd sugar and added a couple of tablespoons of butter (on my second batch )after I found it too dry to work with on the first one. They turned out beautifully. You don’t mention how long they need to dry. They taste yummy!

    1. Like all recipes that contain few ingredients and a dough needs to be formed, some tweaking can be necessary based on brands, temperatures, moisture levels, etc. – glad you found the tweaks that work for you and they only need to dry as long as necessary in order to be rolled…from a half hour to many…will just depend on those variables. Mine was about a half hour.

  5. I’m nowhere near getting married in even the next 2 years, but I believe I just found my wedding favors! I even know what colors they’ll be. Green, yellow and white (white is amazing and saves me actually adding food coloring, yet still gives me a 3rd color) will look amazing in little containers. What an amazingly budget friendly idea you just gave me! Showed the bf and he loves it too. :)

    1. You’re the second person in a week who’s told me she’s going to use these as wedding favors! The only thing is if you’re getting married in the summer and it’s going to be warm out, these are not “shelf stable” indefinitely…they tend to get melty b/c of the butter content. You could freeze them even to buy yourself a bit of extra time but just a heads up on that one! But that’s exciting!

      1. We’ll prolly freeze them just in case. I live in Cali and we were considering a winter wedding since things are cheaper then, with how few weddings happen in that season. So it should work out pretty well.

        I have a nephew who is allergic to milk, eggs, soy and nuts. So I was doing some research earlier for a coconut milk recipe I can do a substitution with. I found one that is very simple. I haven’t tried it yet but I thought I’d share for those interested. I saw another recipe that called for the use of agave instead of sugar, but he gets so few things, I don’t make substitutions where I don’t have to.

        2 14oz. cans coconut milk
        1/2 cup sugar
        Simmer the coconut milk in a medium, heavy bottomed saucepan. Fold in the sugar and stir until dissolved. Reduce the volume by half (this will take about an hour).

        I got the recipe from this site: https://myaspergersgirl.blogspot.com/2008/09/gfcf-sweetened-condensed-coconut-milk.html?m=1

        Hope that helps! :)

      2. I would simply refrigerate a can of full fat coconut milk, let it separate, don’t shake/disturb much, pour off cream, add sugar, at least 1/2 cup (to be as sweet as real sweetened cond milk you need plenty!! of sugar) and then simmer/reduce that. And use multiple cans worth. That way you don’t have all that diluted liquid to contend with.

  6. Mmm, I love butter mints! Sadly, I am the only one in my family who enjoys them, so we never usually have them around (because when we do, I eat and eat and EAT THEM). These are so precious and petite. I love the colors you chose!

  7. We love butter mints! They are so delicious. We remember them as kids! YUM. We are so glad that you linked up to our “Strut Your Stuff Saturday”. Please come back again really soon! Thanks! -The Sisters

  8. I loved these mints when I was a kid, thanks for the memories and the recipe. I’ll be making them soon and I shared the recipe on my facebook page. I’m always looking for new recipes and ideas to share with people!