How To Make The Best Cream Cheese Mints

This recipe creates the best cream cheese mints for giving as gifts, using at celebrations, or for snacking on at home. They turn out deliciously smooth and delightfully creamy.

Ingredients:

1 - 8 ounce package of cream cheese

1/4 cup butter or margarine

2 pound bag of powdered sugar

assorted flavor extracts, 1/2 teaspoon (wintergreen, peppermint, lemon, orange, etc)

assorted food colorings

Directions:

Empty powdered sugar into a bowl and set aside.

Stir butter or margarine and cream cheese in a saucepan over low heat until butter is melted and cream cheese is soft and they are thoroughly mixed together. Remove from heat and add to the powdered sugar. Stir all together until the mix is thoroughy combined.

Add the food color and flavoring. Experiment with the colors. You can make the mints pastel or brighter by adding more or less food color. If you don't stir the food color in very much you can get a tie died or swirled look. If you want the swirled look, mix the flavoring in first. Add the color after the flavoring is mixed in thoroughly and try not to mix very much. Every move made with the mix will blend the color in more.

You can make the whole batch one color and flavor, or divide it into several smaller batches to make different colors and flavors.

There are candy molds you can use to mold the mints into different shapes. You can make candies shaped for the season or holiday. Prepare molds following manufacturer's directions. I like to dip the mint mix in sugar before putting in the molds. After molding set on wax paper to dry.

Or you can roll the mix into one inch balls and place on wax paper. Press with a fork or cookie stamp. You don't have to press down very hard to get an impression in the mint.

Let them sit uncovered until they are firm and dry on the outside. This usually takes four to eight hours.

The pictures show my favorite way to make these. I only use the molds when I am giving them as gifts or taking to a christmas party. I just rolled these into balls and used a fork to press them.

I also make mine rather large, as big as a small cookie! That way I only have to eat one and my sweet tooth is satisfied for awhile! I prefer to make them swirled as you can see. I think they are so much prettier with the color swirled with white! To these I have added a little peppermint flavoring, except the yellow ones. I added vanilla flavoring to those.

Enjoy!