Peppermint Pillow Mints

I hope that you are all enjoying your holiday weekend. Maybe you are spending time with family today, sharing a nice meal around the dinner table. Perhaps you are heading outside to enjoy the warmer spring weather. Or maybe you are like boyfriend and I, you're going to do nothing special at all.

My weekend has been spent getting ready for candy month! Have you been waiting patiently for this month and all of the sweet treats that it promised? According to the poll you all took last month, you wanted more recipes for classic candy bars and gummy candy. I have been boiling away batches of caramel and melting slabs and slabs of chocolate. Today however, I went simple and with a confection that had a sentimental facet to it, pillow mints.

My first, and only, experience with pillow mints are from my many childhood visits to my grams house. No matter the season or time of year, there was always a small crystal bowl of mints sitting on the buffet table. I would inevitably sit in my grandmothers rocking chair and eat mint after mint. Picking my favorite from the other colors, I would leave her little house with a bowl emptied of pink mints.

Making these mints was not only easy and fun (my fingers were stained blue from the food coloring!), but it brought back the memories of my gram and spending weekends at her little house.

One Year Ago: Banana Mallow Cups

Pillow Mints

From Sweet Confections

While these aren't exactly like the mints of my grams house, they have the same flavor. The original pillow mints have a lighter than air texture and they melt in your mouth. The manufacturing method for pillow mints includes puffing them up with air. These little mints get to the right texture after being set out for a few days. If you want an easy mint without any sugar boiling required, these little mints are right for you!

4 3/4 cups powdered sugar
2 tbsp heavy cream
8 tbsp (1/2 cup) butter, removed from the fridge for 20 minutes
1 tsp mint extract
Food coloring (I went with neon food coloring!)

Mix together powdered sugar, butter and peppermint extract until it all comes together. It will look like a soft white dough.

Divide dough into as any batches as you want different colors. Knead colors into the dough until they are homogeneous. Roll the colors doughs into 1/2-inch ropes and set them on a baking sheet. Repeat with all of the colored doughs. Cut the ropes into 1/2-inch pieces and move the pieces around the baking sheet so that the candies aren't touching.

Let sit overnight to dry out. Store open to the air, other wise hey tend to soften up again.