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.
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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!
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.
How to Make Homemade Butter Mints
- Cream together the salt and butter for about a minute.
- Beat in the sweetened condensed milk, powdered sugar, and peppermint extract.
- Continue mixing until a dough forms, then remove the dough from the mixer and divide into one to four equal-sized balls.
- 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.
- To shape the butter mints, roll out a golf ball-sized piece of dough into a long rope and slice into bite-sized pieces.
Recipe FAQs
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.
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.
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.
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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Old-Fashioned Butter Mints
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
- ⅓ 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
Nutrition
Nutrition information is automatically calculated, so should only be used as an approximation.
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Can i put peppermint syrup intead of extract?
I’ve never worked with peppermint syrup so am not sure how to answer this. You can always try it…
Thank you, thank you! I found this recipe on Pinterest and made these mints for my daughter’s engagement party. I rolled them in granulated sugar and pressed them into little heart molds- they were a hit! You have some great recipes, thanks!
Oh I am so glad they’re a hit for you! Fun idea with the heart molds, too!
I love after dinner mints. We always had them in “nut cups” mixed with salty peanuts! I can’t wait to try this as the after dinner mints can be hard to find. Thank you for making a new tradition to my family memory.
I wanted to add that I doubled a batch and froze half. They were great when I unthawed them so you could make these ahead of time (like for upcoming Xmas gifts).
I love this recipe, so much in fact that I was wondering if I could post it on my blog. I did add less salt but other than that I didn’t make any other changes.
I’d prefer if you just linked back to the recipe on my site since you really didn’t change anything. Glad you enjoyed them so much! I like to freeze them, too!
Just made these mints… SO GOOD!I swirled green and blue food coloring together so they look like marbles :) Thanks for the amazing recipe!
Love that you made them and the little marbles sound fabulous!
Thank you so much. My husband and I LOVE butter mints and I am excited to find this. Will be a fun Christmas gift, too.
Enjoy!
Wow! Memories just came back in a flash when I saw these. Used to love them while I was in the States but now that I am in Malaysia, I totally forgot about them til I stumbled across your website. Thank you for sharing your recipe and I hope to attempt this one day.
Oh wow! My grandma had the same mints in her candy dish. I never left her house without a little tissue filled with the buttermints to eat on the way home! How wonderful to have a recipe to make my own. I don’t have any grand kids (yet) so I have plenty of time to prefect your recipe. Thank you : )
Do you have to refrigerate these?
considering they’re made of butter, I think that’s a safe bet long term :)
This brings back wonderful memories as a child. My mom would bring hers to a candy boil and then pour into strips onto frozen buttered marble. She would add different food coloring to each strip. Each of us kids would butter our hands, grab a strip and start pulling and pulling! As soon as it lost its gloss we would twist and snip into pieces! This was one of favorite Christmas traditions! Thank you for pulling out old memories for me!!!
Awww, thanks for sharing :)
Ive had mine in the fridge for a few hours and they are still soft and like dough, is there something i did wrong?
Sounds like you added too much liquid to the dough – you may need to add more powdered sugar OR if you live in a dry climate, roll out the dough and let it get some air. This is a very precise dough, and literally 1 teaspoon of milk can make the difference. Play around with your ratios and you’ll get there!
I just tried these with vanilla extract instead of mint because there was no mint in the cupboard and my family doesn’t really like it. I don’t know how good they will be, they smell like straight condensed milk… Maybe I should’ve stuck to the recipe lol ;)
Yes, since they are called old-fashioned MINTS, really, without using mint – you can’t really compare what you did to what I did and made…since you didn’t use mint, to make mints! I just want to clarify that because others come to the comments and read things so yes, pretty trick to make mints without using mint :)