recipe for vegan after-dinner mints??

http://www.veganforum.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2737

i was vegan for several years, and i had no idea! i was really lax about gelatine/bone charcoal/etc.

Cream of tartar should be okay for vegans, as it comes from grapes. You could make a simple, creamy fondant with spearmint oil as the flavoring:

In a small heavy saucepan, stir together 1 cup of granulated sugar and 1/2 cup of water. Cook over medium heat to soft ball stage (235 deg F). Remove from heat, add spearmint oil (maybe 1/2 tsp? You'd have to test this for proper mintyness.), then stir in 1/2 tsp cream of tartar (tartaric acid), hard and rapidly until the mixture starts to get creamy and firm up. Drop rapidly onto waxed paper/parchment/silicone baking sheet, or roll quickly into a narrow cylinder and slice into disks.

thank you so much! i'll give this recipe a try and let you know if it impresses my friend :)

I'm going to try this today, though I've only got vanilla extract in the house. I've got a few mint sprigs left over from the tabbouli I made yesterday, maybe will chop and let steep in the vanilla for a bit.

Okay, this worked pretty well! Since I didn't have any mint oil, I chopped up fresh mint and let it steep for 10 minutes in 1/4 cup of rum. My vanilla extract was at the end of the bottle (about 3/8 tsp left), so I poured that into the rum too as well as the vanilla bean that was tucked into the vanilla bottle (Penzey's, i <3 u!). I strained the flavored rum through a fine mesh into a 1/2 cup measure, then topped it off with water. It doesn't take long for the sugar syrup to get to soft ball, maybe 10 min? After stirring in the cream of tartar, I put the bottom of the pan into a basin of cool water to speed things along while I beat it hard. It will start to feel sticky after a minute of beating, then will start to gain opacity as the crystals start forming. I think at that point you could drop it out by spoonfuls, but you have to work really really fast. I let mine go a bit too long, so when I turned it out of the pan and tried to roll it into a snake, the ends were starting to get a bit too hard. So instead of small disks, mine are bigger. Very soft and creamy and good right away, but leave them out to dry for a day and they'll last longer in your mouth.

do you think you could coat them in vegan choc? would that work?

and also: thanks lauren!! there was a link to actual real-life vegan after dinner mints... if my homemade mints don't work out, this vegan store will come in very handy. i'm not vegan, but my friend was telling me about how most cane sugar isn't vegan because an animal by-product (of bones) is used to bleach. i really had no idea we lived in such a meat-dominated world. it's a little scary that this kinda stuff isn't more widely known.

In the US at least, cane and beet sugar processors use activated carbon instead of charred bones. It's cheaper to use as it's much more efficient.

After eating several of them, I think they'd be great coated in chocolate! I'm going to see if I can let the rest dry for a day or two, to see if the texture changes.

this is piquing my curiosity! i am not vegan, but my sister is vegetarian, so maybe i'll try to make these for her when she comes up in a few weeks!

my friend's response to lauren's vegan afterdinner mint link was: HOLY SHIT.

:)

he was suitably impressed; he's been hunting for these for ages.

i'm glad it helped!

I brought some of these in today, and got the thumbs up from various coworkers. They start to soften if left in a plastic bag.

Um, the mints start to soften. They probably need to dry for 4-5 days.

I just made batch #2 of these and am now buzzing on a serious sugar high.

This time in an effort to get more mintiness, I let 1 oz of dried spearmint (about a dry cup) sit in 1/3 cup of rum for two days. I used about 2 tbsp of the liquid and 2 tsp of double vanilla (with enough water to make up 1 cup) for 2 cups of sugar (which was a double batch). I should have stuck with a single batch. Though minty and creamy, they aren't intensely minty by any means.