Disney Treats - Mickey Mouse Peppermint Patties - National Peppermint Patty Day - February 11th

Today is National Peppermint Patty Day! There's quite a few people in this house that loves to eat them. There's always a bag of York Peppermint Patties in our freezer, just in case someone feels in the mood for them. 

We could have just opened a bag of York Peppermint Patties and called it a day, but in keeping with our whole "make it at home" mantra, I was curious if it was possible to make your own Peppermint Patties. Turns out, you totally can! 

I'm always on the lookout to try to add some Disney flair to whatever we're doing. Does Disney make Mickey shaped peppermint patties? Not that I could find. Actually in my search, I'm not seeing any Mickey shaped peppermint patties anywhere? Could these be one of the first ones made? Let's get to making them!

I had no idea how easy these were to make. For the mint filling, there's just 4 ingredients. Powdered sugar, corn syrup, butter, and peppermint oil. I'm using the recipe for Homemade Peppermint Patties from butterwithasideofbread.com.

And you know I'm going to have my little chef helping me out. She's the one who measured all the ingredients for us into the mixing bowl. 

And then she turned on the mixer. This powdered sugar mixture goes from looking like this...

To this about 4-5 minutes later. The recipe calls it a dough, and yeah, it does look like a dough. 

You start with 1 tsp of peppermint oil and then give it a taste to see if it's minty enough to your liking. What do you think Alli? 

Alli - Pretty good!

She grabbed samples and ran off to give some to Ian and anyone else who wanted one. 

Now that we've got our dough, it's time to flatten it out and use our cookie cutters. 

After flattening it to the approximate thickness, we started by using the small cookie cutters. 

But the plan was always to use the Mickey Mouse cookie cutters to do a whole bunch more. Originally we had about 20 circular style peppermint patties, but decided to smoosh them all back up and turn them into Mickey heads. 

Alli - And Minnie!

She grabbed a few of the "bow" cookie cutters we've got and made sure to cut out some of those too. 

Alli those all look amazing! 

Before we can dip them in chocolate, these had to go in the freezer. They are way too fragile to be dipping and shaking right now. Freezing them for an hour will make them rock hard, plus the chocolate will solidify more quickly onto the cold patties. 

For the next part, we're going to need some chocolate to dip these in. Traditional patties are made with dark chocolate. Dark chocolate is usually defined as being 50%-90% cacao. The higher the number, the darker the chocolate. We're using semi-sweet morsels, which have 47% cacao. 

For the dipping chocolate, I'm using the Perfect Peppermint Patties recipe from tasteofhome.com.

Again Alli measured our ingredients, this time into a microwaveable bowl. 

We microwaved in 30 second increments on High, giving it a stir after each time, for about 2 minutes. 

Looks wonderful Alli! Let's get dipping!

All our patties are hard frozen. I left them on their frozen tray to try to keep them cold for as long as possible. 

The patty goes into the warm chocolate, then gets flipped over for 100% coverage.

Alli followed up with a lot more of the smaller peppermint patties, following my lead by flipping them over and trying to shake off the excess. 

It doesn't look that pretty now, but wait until they're done. These are going out into the cool garage to set. 

Oh now Ian shows up, when it's time to lick the chocolate off the utensils. Alli has changed into an appropriate Minnie dress to compliment her Minnie Peppermint Patties. 

Those look beautiful! 

Alli, I love those Minnie and Mickey Peppermint Patties!

First we're going to try the Alli's homemade peppermint patties. Theresa wanted coffee to go along with the sweet peppermint chocolate flavors. 

Hey! These are pretty good!

Let's try these York Peppermint Patties. They do taste different, but I'm sure we could make ours just like that if we wanted. The York patties have a stronger peppermint flavor. We could have added more peppermint to ours, but Alli deemed them good when she tried them earlier. The dark chocolate has a different taste, but we could have done that ourselves too. Maybe next time. 

The inside mint filling is the perfect texture and is delicious. 

These homemade Peppermint Patties turned out great! 

Happy National Peppermint Patty Day!