Heart Shaped Breath Mints - Valentines 2018

My 2018 valentines day gift project was conceived and inspired by a blog post for homemade breath mints and Fimo hearts made for me by my daughter.

Laura's bowl of hearts

Laura shaped all of her clay hearts by hand but I needed hundreds of them so the biggest challenge for this project was finding a heart shape cutting tool small enough to make a breath mint --and I DID! It was in the clay supplies area at Michael's and the smallest heart in this kit was the perfect size. Once I had a heart cutter I knew I was good to go with this project.

Heart Shaped Breath Mints

Supply List

• Heart shape cutter
• Gum paste (I used a 2 pound bucket of Satin Ice gum paste and that was more than enough to make over a dozen tins of mints)
• Red food dye
• Hard candy flavoring oil(s) (flavor extracts may work just as well but I had cinnamon and spearmint flavoring oils on hand and they worked extremely well)

Steps

• One cup of gum paste. I could only cut so many tiny hearts at one time so I made multiple one cup batches over the course of several days .
• Add red food coloring and mix in. It took only two drops of food coloring per one cup of gum paste to get the pink I wanted. Wear gloves if you don't want your hands looking like this!





• Add flavoring to taste preference. One teaspoon of hard candy flavoring oil per cup of gum paste gave a strong flavor. Mileage may vary with other types of flavorings.
• Roll out gum paste to approximately 1/4" depth. Use confectioners sugar to help with sticking.
• Cut, cut, cut and cut hearts. Reroll and cut some more. Repeat until you can't stand it any more and eat the remaining gum paste yourself.





• The mints are edible immediately but they will harden on the surface after a few hours of air drying and if you leave them out for days they will become "Altoid" like hard. I actually put my mints on parchment paper in a low temperature oven for about 45+ minutes to get the drying started but it still took several days after that until they were really hard.
• Package as desired. I used the same 2 oz tins and Avery labels from the heart tea bags project
  
  
  
  
  

I LOVED this project! It did get a little tedious cutting out all the hearts but the results were perfection and I would definitely do it again.