Homemade Altoids Recipe

Altoids are surprisingly simple to make, and you can create any flavor you can think up!  All you need are a couple ingredients, some flavored oils, and your imagination.

No longer do you need to be a slave to the Altoids empire!  Now you can make curiously strong candies in your own kitchen.  I started with peppermint, cinnamon, and sour apple.  What's next?  Clove? Coffee? Bacon??  The sky is the limit!  

These can be stored and gifted in your own personalized tins.  How thoughtful!

Step 1 The Secret Ingredients

These Altoids require few ingredients, but they might not be too easy to get a hold of:

Gum Paste
Powdered Confectioner's Sugar
Flavored Oils
Citric Acid (to add to flavors to make them sour)
Bubble tea straw (or small round cutter)

I found my gum paste at Sur La Table, but any store that has cake decorating supplies should have this.  I used LorAnn brand flavored oils bought from the internet.  There were too many flavors to choose from, so I got them all!   I used a liquid citric acid to add to my apple flavor, but that was a disaster!  I highly recommend using it in powdered form.

Comments

[banzitothecheeto]

You could make convo hearts the same way, you'd just have to figure out how to print them..

[scoochmaroo]

I was thinking the same thing this morning! I even have a tiny heart-shaped cutter. And they make these cake decorating pens you could use to write on them!

[clonetrooper13]

I wanna try these but I'm not sure where to get flavored oil...Could you find it at a cake shop? Like if someone wanted to flavor fondant or something?

[clibanarius]

This has been on my radar for a while, and was one of my first 30 days of instructables projects. I used the gum paste powder and the proportions here (started with good ol' peppermint). Took a good two weeks to dry out properly (GA humidity?), was INTENSELY strong, just the way we like them. Was surprised that gum paste is almost entirely powdered sugar. Seems like the next step would be to make your own gum paste first!

[airgunguy123]

thanks clibanarius!

[scoochmaroo]

Do it!

Glad it worked out for you. Your 30 days of Instructables is brilliant! I absolutely love it.

[Xm3buX]

I've never tried Altoids, what is the texture I am aiming to get for these? Chewy? Hard? Something in between?

Thanks.

[bobtannica]

Altoids are hard and, well, a bit chalky but in a good way!

[shveet]

hard. really thats all i can say,.

[airgunguy123]

COOL!! can u make cinnamon altoids.

[TheGreatS]

Couldn't you just roll the Altoids "dough" to the desired width and cut it with a knife? I think you could waste less dough that way (or at least save you the trouble of molding the "dough" back into cut-able size).

[DreamingSheep]

I had the same thought but without having made these (yet) I would be concerned that the dough is not dense enough to support a knife cutting it, unless that knife was extremely thin or extremely sharp.

You might end up with squashed shapes simliar to these:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/19/After_dinner_mints.jpg

or if you rotate the rolled dough 90 degrees per cut you could get e triangular sharpe like these:
http://www.thesweetiestall.com/chocolate%20mints.JPG

I suspect that using scissors will enhance the look.

[TheGreatS]

Thank you on the clarification. I didn't know the dough wasn't all that strong and couldn't support a knife.

[magdiego]

A pizza cutter will probably work easily.

[sbrooker]

Okay, the biggest question I have about this is, of course, how are the taste and texture? I mean, in a blind test, would I be able to tell which was an Altoid and which was homemade? Is there a significant difference, or is this a rather uncannily awesome recipe?

Because as much as I adore the 'toids, it IS rather an expensive addiction. I noticed that on the Altoids tin, their ingredients are sugar, gum Arabic, artificial flavors, gelatin, and dye. Do you have an opinion on the use of gelatin or doesn't it make a significant difference?

[everyday im shuffling, except fridays, i got to get down on friday]

just when i was running out of ways to use my altoids tins, now i can just fill them back up

[Suzanne in Orting]

Years ago, at a rubber stamp fair, one of the vendors was using the stamps and food coloring to stamp lollipops before they hardened. You'd just need a brand new set of stamps. The silicon ones seem to me to be the better choice when compared to the rubber ones, but I'm just estimating here.

Suzanne in Orting, WA

[ajohnson153]

You never did answer the question posed above about how close these match in consistency to the real deal. I bring it up because I am curious as well. Also can you mold them into different shapes using chocolate molds? I wanted to make some in different shapes as party favors or something like that.

[scoochmaroo]

They are remarkably like the original - except the sour ones which stayed a bit soft because of using the liquid citric acid. I imagine you can use some molds! Give it a shot!

[derykgoerke]

OMG these are so good...i made sour tangarine

[danneauxs]

Just in case gum paste finding is an issue there is this alternative:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080906001555AAfNYFT

haven't tried it yet but it appeals to me since we have about 20 Lbs of confectioners sugar left over from over ambitious holiday plans.

[razordu30]

This is great! One question - I want to make homemade caffeinated mints like these: http://bit.ly/hzax63

The problem is while caffeine is pretty harmless in its proper dosage, it can be pretty dangerous if you take too much. So my question is what would be the safest way to introduce caffeine powder? My worry is whether or not the caffeine gets distributed through the entire mix and each pill has the proper amount. It would be scary if it all ended up only spread out among four or five mints.

[nolte919]

BE CAREFUL!!

I used to make my one soda pop. I wanted to add caffeine. I was faced with the same dilemma of dosing small amounts. So I dissolved the caffeine in water. You can make the mixture however dilute you want and when it dissolves it is very evenly distributed. And since you dry the candy all that water will evaporate.

I was torn between making my mixture 10mg per 1ml or 10mg per 10ml. Well I mixed it at 10 to 1 but added it so my soda as if I mixed it 10 to 10. So I accidentally added 10 times what I meant to. What made matters worse is that I mixed the soda with alcohol and so didn't notice the effects until early the next morning when the alcohol had worn off but the caffeine was alive and well in my system. My heart was racing, my skin was crawling, and I couldn't sit still. I ended up going to the emergency room. I was in no real danger of dying and the doctors thought it was rather hilarious but it was terrifying. They gave me drugs to calm me down 24 hours later I was fine.

So go ahead and do this if you want, I don't mean to dissuade you. Just let me repeat, because it bears saying twice...

BE CAREFUL

[Aspirin99]

I'm doing the same thing. My plan is to make a batch first without caffeine, taking care to note all my measurements. See exactly how many units the batch produces. Then divide the target-dosage-per-unit by number of units.

If you buy bulk caffiene, like at purebulk dot com or amazon dot com, you should know that 1/8 th of a teaspoon equals 215 MG of caffeine, so don't eyeball it. Work the math to target 100 MG per mint, or whatever you want. Add the caffeine to the second batch.

Warning those who will eat them that eating more than 600 MG in one sitting will make them ill (more or less per person). Excessive amounts will make them dead. One Red Bull has 80 MG, in comparison.

Another easy option for this is to make Butter mints (the no cooking kind).

[maxs]

I would use the powder gum base and caffine tablets like NoDoze. That way you can crush the tablets into a fine powder and mix them VERY WELL with the powdered gum base. Then use the flavoring oil and water to constitute the powered gum base. This is how pharmaceutical companies make tablets, by mixing all the powdered ingredients (active ingredient, colorants, fillers and binders) together before they put it in a tablet machine.

The Penguin Caffeinated Peppermints say they have as much caffine as a 12 ounce cola. Coke and Pepsi have about 35mg of caffine in a 12 ounce can.

You probably could do this with the gum base you buy as a paste and not a powder, but it would be more difficult to get an even distribution of caffine.

Let us know how it turns out. Just don't eat all of your homemade mints at once!

[HollyMann]

Wow scoochmaroo you are all over the place on here - so many awesome projects - thank you! My son will absolutely LOVE this! You are amazing!

[rcampanoli]

You could also roll the dough out into a log or "snake" and then cut it in small increments

[taragl]

I tried making these mints and they turned out great. Mine were cherry mint pictured here (I would go a little heavier on the cherry next time), and my son made some kind of buttery vanilla marshmallow mixture which was an even bigger hit. This is the first time I've worked with Lorann oils and they were fairly inexpensive and really neat to play with. We halved the recipe so we could play with flavor combinations in smaller batches.

One thing I would caution is that the peppermint oil is some heavy duty stuff. I managed to drip a bit on a bamboo bowl and it removed the finish on that spot. (And I got myself into trouble with my habit of rubbing my eyes, but we won't go into *that* ridiculous story...)

[Aspirin99]

What flavor did you end up liking the best?

[scoochmaroo]

Sour apple!

[Aspirin99]

Awww that's good news. I love sour apple, but didn't know how it would work in this application.

[harthoppy]

i wonder how you would get a bacon flavored or even better yet a bacon flavored with Caffiene!! call Santa I know what i want for Christmas!!!

awesome 'ible thanks a ton i am going to look this up again this week or next i think . ( lots of time home from work right now )

[lilrkt]

I wonder if I can use honey oil to make some honey-love altoids....

[Jay_Clark]

Do these have the same consistency/hardness as the OTC altoids or are they more like the candy hearts that make up standard Valentine's fare? I am curiously pondering this question! :D

[adamazing]

100g gum paste : 1 dram flavoring

Is that a misspelling, meant to be "1 gram flavoring"? As in the gram, unit of mass? Or is it really a dram? I only ask because both amounts are small and not outside the realm of possibility. :)

[scoochmaroo]

I do mean dram. It's the full amount of oil as commonly sold.

[uberdum05]

So basically, according to wikipedia, you could just put 3.5mL of the oil in?

[mooshisho]

;) A dram is a legitimate unit of measurement. I believe a dram is equivalent to an 8th of a fluid ounce? Please do correct me if I'm wrong. :)

[dmwright]

Close but alas no cookie According to my "converts any measure to any other measure" chart 
1 Dram = 27.34375 Grains
               1.771845 Grams
               0.0625 Ounces
There are also troy drams should you wish to measure precious metals.
1 Dram (troy) = .1371429 Ounces
                         .125 Ounces (troy)

I know, way more than anyone wants to know, but hey that's the way my head works.

[adamazing]

Hi there, yeah I knew that, but I've never bought flavouring and didn't realise it was actually sold in drams. Other than this instructable, I've only ever heard "dram" referring to a "dram of whiskey" though evidently there's a world of cake-makers and sweet-makers that still use it! :)


I guess it's one of those archaic units of measurement that persists due to one particular usage, like furlongs in horse-racing.