A Festive Failure: Making Pinterest’s Peppermint Ornaments Turned Out to Be a Total Disaster
I've been pinning to my Christmas board so much my thumbs are sore. I am ready to make garland from dried fruit, to create fancy-pants hand-lettered place settings for the family meal, to craft homemade bath bombs and package them in hand-frosted mason jars. I'm like Martha Stewart up in here. Imagine my glee when I found a way to make Christmas ornaments from peppermints... and then imagine my horror when it all went wrong. So, so wrong.
I found a pin to this project from Hello Homebody--you can create stunning ornaments by baking starlight mints in the oven. All you need is an oven, a baking tray, non-stick spray, parchment paper, metal cookie cutters... and a degree in wizardry because this deceptively simple project was more than I could handle.
I followed the recipe to a T. I'm a stickler for following the rules, so I didn't deviate from the method used to transform gross peppermint discs into gorgeous peppermint ornaments.
I'll even make like Algebra II and show my proof. (LOL, math joke! What? I'm kind of a nerd, but whatever. I own it.)
I waited five minutes, as my oven is old and wonky and weird--and I need a new one desperately (Hey, Santa, Hey!). Things tend to bake faster in my dinosaur of an oven, so I knew I needed to get my mints out sooner rather than later. I was prepared to see success. I was ready to be amazed. and here's what I got...
It was LITERALLY a hot mess. I don't know if you can tell from the photo above, but in addition to being Pepto-pink blobs of bland, they were bubbling over. My ornaments were a complete and utter failure.
I let them cool and then attempted to remove them from their cookie cutter molds. This was easier said than done. They cracked into pieces, and they were strangely sticky.
Out of the six I made, two were somewhat salvageable.
I suppose I could try this again and bake the mints for 2.5 minutes--maybe that would work. Or I could just buy my Christmas ornaments. That sounds good.
In the meantime, I'll stick to real baking. I'm good at that.