time to use up those leftover mints!

I wanted to make something fun this holiday season and had been seeing so much of the mint platters people were posting all over the internet. So I thought I would give it a try. This was a fun project to do with my daughter. it was really simple, fast, easy, and best of all....very inexpensive.

Here is what you need to get started:

First what you will need to do is pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees

Next you will need to start opening all your bags of mints and unwrapping them. I found it best to just start throwing them into a bowl once unwrapped.

After you get the mints unwrapped, you need to take your wax or parchment paper and cover your entire pan. You can use any shape pan. I chose a gingerbread pan but any one will do. The best to use are ones with lips around them because the mints run when heated.

Start placing your mints in the shape of your pan. You can do designs with the mints as well or just use one color mint. We used both spearmint and peppermints. With the shape of our pan, I attempted to make it red, green, red, green....but it started getting too hard that we just began to put them on there as best as we could in the shape of a gingerbread man.

Once the mints are all in place and covering the area you would like, go ahead and pop that in the oven. Make sure you keep a very, very close eye on it. Especially if you are using wax paper. We used wax paper and the oven began to smoke really bad. I would suggest parchment paper for this project. Let it bake for about seven minutes. 

It burns very quickly so keep a close eye on it.

Once it's done baking, remove it from the oven. The mints should looked fused together and nicely melted.

Let the pan cool completely before removing. Any movement to the mints could cause them to warp. The pan didn't take very long to cool. Around 15-30 mins. Then you can remove it from the pan and the paper. The wax paper stuck but I didn't mind since it was on the bottom of it. You couldn't see or tell.

Then you can use the platter for your treats. In our case, I placed some chocolate chip cookies my daughter helped me make. Be careful though, the platter is now like glass so treat it like that. It can break very easily.