Holidays - Candy Cane Syrup

Hello! Earlier this week the cashier at Meijer rang up four boxes of candy canes as part of my grocery order. "Going to hang them up on your Christmas tree?" she cheerily asked. Well, actually, no - I told her they were going to be used in this RECIPE.  Where's the fun of using things in the usual way? :)


This is what the syrup looks like:

As you can see, it's a festive dark pink color. My husband loves putting it in his coffee, and as he drinks a lot of that beverage this time of year, I've already made two batches of the stuff. I haven't tried it in anything else, but imagine it'd be nice on chocolate or vanilla ice creams, shakes made with those ice creams, maybe mixed in a frosting for chocolate brownies, in hot chocolate,etc. 


I should add that I thought the peppermint flavor didn't seem strong enough when the recipe was made as written - perhaps the taste of coffee made the flavor more muted. So to increase the pepperminty-ness (probably not really a word, but so what), I added an additional candy cane - and a couple of drops of the peppermint oil (not extract) that I already had on hand from a candymaking project. Now we're talking peppermint flavor! 


Anyway, it's easy to make and makes a nice gift this time of year, I think. If you like peppermint, I think you'll like this recipe. 


PS after Christmas was over and the candy canes were gone, I tried making the recipe with a similar amount of those red-and-white mint candies - I think they're called "starlight mints"? But my husband said it wasn't the same so I never repeated it. Guess I'll just have to stock up on candy canes to last us at leas a little while into winter!