Easy After Dinner Mints

My Sister & I decided to make these mints for the candy contest, here is a easy tutorial to show you how we did it. 
It's a fun thing to make & reminds us of playing with play-doh.. except, well.. you can eat this!

Ingredients:

2 1/2 Cups Icing Sugar (Confectioner's Sugar)
3 Tablespoons Softened Butter or Margarine 
2 Tablespoons Cream
1/2 Teaspoon Peppermint Flavouring  (we only used 1/4 Teaspoon because we used real peppermint oil)
Food Colouring



Note: I tried to add little notes to the pictures but it was taking waaay too long, sorry.

Mix icing sugar , butter/margarine , cream & peppermint flavouring together in a bowl with a fork.
(If you don't feel that you're butter/margarine isn't soft enough put it in the microwave for about 10 seconds)

Your mixture might not seem like it would make good dough, but once you knead it in the next step you'll see that there's nothing to worry about.

Your mixture will probably be a little crumbly in the bowl, so I suggest kneading it a little in the bowl before putting it on the counter.

Once it has joined all together & is more malleable, flip the bowl over to get the dough out onto the counter.

Now I know that there are different ways to knead but this is just the way I had done it:
Use your hands to form your dough a bit into a ball, then squish it down so that it's flat & then fold it back over onto itself & repeat until the dough is soft & easy to form.

Once your dough it kneaded & easy to squish around & form it's time to colour it!

We wanted 4 different colours of mints so we separated the dough into 4... blobs? Haha.

We then put them in separate bowl (because our counter top is white & we didn't want to stain it) & then added the food colouring.
You really only need 1 drop at the most, & if you want soft coloured mints (like the ones they give away at weddings) you probably want even less food colouring... or maybe more dough.
You can mix it in the bowl with your hands but after a while it gets annoying to do, so in the end you'll probably end up taking the balls out of the bowl to mix it (in your hands, not on the counter top :P )

Now you're going to want to roll the dough out into a rope to make the little pillow shapes.. or whatever shapes you want.. or just eat the blob of dough like my sister suggested.

There are different ways to roll the dough:
1. You can roll it between your hands vertically so that the rope that the dough forms would just lower onto the counter, but we found our dough was too soft to do this & it would just break off. 
2. You can rolls the entire ball of dough out into a rope with your palms on the counter
3. You can roll the dough into a small log & take pieces off of it to roll with your fingers.

We ended up with number 3:
Roll the ball of dough into a small log & from there rip small chunks of the dough off of the log to use.
With your small chunk, roll it out a little with your palm & the place your 2 index fingers in the middle of the dough rope & rock it back & forth, while moving your index fingers outward. 
This will stretch the rope out.

In our case the rope broke a few times, but we just continued on. It doesnt have to be perfect.

Now you're going to cut the dough.
If your dough is stiff enough you can cut the ropes with scissors to get the desired "pillow" effect.
Our dough wasn't stiff enough to cut with scissors so we just cut it with an icing knife, but you can use any knife really (I know not every one has an icing knife)

What do we do with these pieces now that they're cut?
Get out a cookie sheet, cover it with wax paper & place your mints on that.
You can roll them in icing sugar before placing them on the wax paper, we felt that there was enough sugar in these mints so we skipped that step.

For the best results you should leave them to dry on the wax paper for a few days, or at least overnight.
But that didn't matter to my family because they were picking at them right after they were done, which is still pretty tasty & they just melt in your mouth.

You can really make anything you want with these mints! 
Heck, you don't even need to make them mints.. if you want to make the coloured dough different flavours, just make the dough without adding the flavour & then when the dough is separated into the balls just add different flavours to each ball. You can use orange flavouring, or vanilla, or lemon, what ever flavour you want really! Experiment.

We decided to shape our other colours differently than just making the pillows.
Blue = Pillows
Red = Strawberries
Yellow = Bananas 
Green = Mint leaves / Pillows /  & some strawberry leaves

If you want to spend the time you can form the dough into some really amazing stuff, we just wanted to have fun with it this time. Our mother is a cake decorator so we make these with her quite often, & the detail that you can put into them can be amazing.
Or you can just put the dough into some candy molds if you want to cheat : P

These are a really easy & fun candy to make.
Make them with your kids, they'll have tons of fun! Like I said in the beginning it's like play-doh you can eat!

I hope that anyone that makes these has as much fun with them as my sister & I did : D