Frugal Friday Tip: Pretty Peppermint Sugar
This is my first time contributing to the Frugal Friday posts. I should have posted this right after Christmas. If you are like us, you always have candy canes left over after the holidays. Here is a great idea that I wish I could take credit for, but I can't. I saw a piece on the Today Show after Christmas where this was one of the ideas presented. Take your leftover peppermint candy from Christmas and run it through your coffee grinder. You can clean your coffee grinder first by running some white rice through it. It makes a wonderful peppermint sugar that is great in hot chocolate or sprinkled over vanilla ice cream. I've also mixed it into whipped cream to use over chocolate cake. YUM! I would suggest that you could mix it to taste into powdered sugar to stretch your peppermint if you don't have many pieces. I think this would work well with any flavor hard candy. I want to try it with butterscotch.
The results are pretty, pink and yummy.
5 comments:
That looks great!! Did it ruin your coffee grinder, or make it really, really hard to clean? That scares me a little, because I tried to grind peppermint another way, and it was such a sticky mess. Let me know! :)
Hey Carrie, that looks so delicious! I love drinking hot chocolate and used to just drop part of a peppermint stick in there. This would be fun to try!
We've always just the candy canes in a plastic bag and broken ours up with a hammer to use on ice-cream, but I love this idea better- it has more applications!
I didn't have any real problem griding the peppermint except with one that was a little gummy feeling. I think it had gotten damp somehow. I did find that using a medium grind the first time and then a fine grind seemed to work better. I stopped the grinder and checked on the progress until I was sure how it was working. It wasn't hard to clean up, I soaked the lid in some warm water and just rinsed the inside with the same and towel dried. I don't think I would try to make a huge batch in the coffee grinder because it would take too long. I think mine was about 8 or 9 candy canes. I was thinking that maybe one of those mini food processors might work as well.
That is such a cool idea. I never would have thought of this. Thanks for sharing.
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