Lemon butter mints are the perfect combination of sweet and tangy. Made with simple ingredients they are easy to make and fun to eat!

You might also like our original old-fashioned butter mints recipe. They are so easy to customize with a variety of flavors and colors.

Watch out step by step video!

Note: The video shows how to make original butter mints. The lemon ones are made in a similar fashion, just shaped a little differently.

Lemon Butter Mints

Butter mints are often served at weddings and parties. They come in a variety of colors and are hard in texture until you pop them in your mouth and they soften. You might recognize them from restaurants. Many places will gift you one as an after-dinner mint. I remember them from my childhood because my grandma served them at her daughters’ weddings. I remember sitting at my Aunt Julie’s reception and snacking on mixed nuts and butter mints the whole time!

My kids love butter mints, especially my 11-year-old. These lemon ones are actually her creation! She used our original recipe and made it even better. I love how she shaped her little mints! I snapped some photos of the finished product, but she made these 100% on her own.

Flavored with a bit of lemon extract, they are tangy and sweet. One recipe makes a couple of hundred mints. Perfect to store in a jar or freeze for later.

Lemon Butter Mints Ingredients

(scroll to the end for a recipe card to follow)

Butter: obviously. You’ll need a small amount of softened butter. I always use salted butter, but you can use unsalted butter if you’d like.

Sweetened condensed milk: You’ll only need 1/3 of a cup. You can save the rest of the can of sweetened condensed milk by freezing it.

Powdered sugar: Powdered sugar brings everything together and helps form the dough.

Lemon extract: not to be confused with lemon oil. Lemon extract adds great flavor to these “mints”.

Vanilla: Just a tad for rich flavor.

Food coloring: Optional, but gives the lemon mints a pretty pastel color.

How To Make Lemon Butter Mints

Beat butter until smooth and creamy with an electric hand mixer (or stand mixer with paddle attachment).

Add remaining ingredients (including a couple of drops of food coloring) and mix until a soft dough forms. If you need to add a little more powdered sugar to prevent the dough from being too sticky you can.

Lightly dust your work surface with powdered sugar (if necessary) and roll the dough to 1/2″ thickness using a rolling pin.

Use the end of a frosting tip (1A size is PERFECT) and cut the dough into tiny circles. If you don’t have a frosting tip, pinch the dough into 2″ balls then roll each ball into a long rope and cut into tiny pieces using a pizza cutter.

You can eat the mints right away but definitely allow the candy to dry on parchment-lined baking sheets for 24 hours before placing it into a container. This will give it change to dry out a bit.

Lemon mints are best when stored in the refrigerator after drying.