P.S. Cut down on the extract girl! 1/8 teaspoon, maybe even just a dash. But it works wonders! I love these though! So cute. I had the same problem and did a bunch of research on it. Google has saved my life so many times.

I found a few recipes for meringue online that use cream of tartar, so I tried it.
I whisked 3 egg whites with 1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar and a pinch of salt. One recipe for peppermint meringue said to add the peppermint in at this stage, but I didn’t.
I whisked this mixture until it had soft peaks, then with the beaters still beating I slowly added 3/4 cup caster sugar. (finely ground white sugar but not powdered sugar)

I beat this mixture until it had firm peaks, then removed the beaters. I added a few drops of peppermint essence (containing the dreaded peppermint oil) and VERY SLOWLY AND CAREFULLY folded it through without beating.
I tasted it to make sure it had enough peppermint flavour and it tasted perfect to me, so I piped the stars onto the tray and baked them for about 25 minutes at 100 degrees Celcius.

They almost completely held their shape! They VERY slightly deflated, and I mean VERY slightly. They are so cute and lovely!

My idea is to dip the bottoms in melted chocolate instead of sandwiching them, so I did that and they look so gorgeous!

I hope this helps other people because it worked very well for me! I guess beating the peppermint oil through the meringue just works it in too much and the fat content destroys it. But lightly folding with a metal spoon seems ok.

Good luck everyone! :D

I put the tray of sticky, foamy meringue kisses into a cooling oven and let them dry out; now they’re not sticky anymore and they’re nice and crisp. So it’s basically the best result I can get.
Not deflated, but not strongly flavoured.

I could not accept the fact that peppermint oil in meringue would deflate the mixture, ruining my xmas present idea of peppermint meringues dipped in chocolate. So I checked all of my baking books (I have way more than one human needs) and found at least 50 DIFFERENT recipes for meringue. I couldn’t find any that used peppermint, but I found several that used coffee or vanilla or some other kind of flavouring.
Some recipes used cornflour and vinegar, and the sugar and essence had to be heated in a pan to dissolve and become a thin syrup. I thought this syrup idea might work with peppermint so I tried it. (you know when you bring alcohol to the boil to remove the alcohol taste? I hoped that bringing the peppermint to the boil would magically remove the oil from it LOL)

So I heated the sugar and peppermint essence (containing peppermint oil) in a pan untilt he sugar dissolved and the mixture boiled for about 10 seconds. I removed it from the heat to cool slightly and began whisking my egg white. When the egg white was a bit foamy, I added the cornflour and vinegar like the recipe said, and beat it a little more, then added the syrup in a thin stream while the beater continued to beat.

The result was interesting…
The syrup smelled very strongly of peppermint and when I sniffed it, my nose felt like it was burning inside, kinda like when you sniff harsh chemicals. I was worried the peppermint taste might be too strong but when I added it to the meringue and continued to beat it, it tasted pepperminty but not overpoweringly so.

I was concerned about the texture of my meringue though, because even though it was very stiff and held its shape well, it was very foamy and bubbly which is not the texture I want.
I continued anyway, and painted the inside of my piping bag with red and green stripes and piped the foamy stars onto my trays and baked them.

I’m pleased to say that they held their shape perfectly. No deflation whatsoever. Some of them are actually too tall for my liking because of the way I piped them. Even though they held shape, they somehow lost their peppermint taste and it’s so hard to tell that they’re flavoured peppermint that it seems pointless to advertise them as peppermint flavoured kisses.

Also, another disappointment is the texture of them. The foamy-ness is not what I wanted, and the end result doesn’t look the way I want them to look. They are also extremely sticky to touch and won’t let go of my fingers, therefore they’d be impossible to dip into melted chocolate.

I was determined to rectify those problems though, so I started again.

I assumed the over foamy-ness was because of the vinegar and cornflour, so I did the entire recipe again but without those two ingredients. I boiled the syrup and added it into the meringue, contuining to beat.
I was very disappointed and frustrated at this point, because the meringue would not stiffen. It was a shiny, white liquid mess that failed to hold its peaks and I wanted to die. I didn’t want to throw it away so as a last resort I added the vinegar and cornflour just to see what would happen… and like magic, it stiffened.

I was pretty smug now, because I thought I had solved my problem. The meringue was the perfect texture I wanted it to be; not foamy and airy, it was stiff, thick, glossy, and pepperminty.

I was too eager to see how they’d bake to bother painting my piping bag, so I swirled some colouring into the mixture to see how successful that would be. (It failed – red and green turns into latte/brown when mixed together.)

Even though the colour of the mixture wasn’t appealing, the texture seemed perfect so I piped them anyway.
I put them in the oven and returned after a few minutes to see how they were progressing, and I wanted to die again. They had deflated! They looked just like the ones you made; kinda dome shaped but not peaked at all.

At the moment I’m deciding whether I want to go to the store to buy more sugar so I can try again, but I’m starting to lose hope.
Whoever thought peppermint meringue would cause such a fuss?

My end conclusions:

adding vinegar and cornflour to the mixture thickens it
but
they deflated in the oven anyways.

I guess the best solution is to make the meringue very, very foamy before adding the syrup and cornflour and vinegar, which results in an extremely foamy mixture that holds its shape when baked but turns out very sticky. Maybe I need to cook them longer to crisp so they lose the stickyness? And maybe they won’t lose their pepperminty flavour if I make it stronger this time?

I’ll keep trying and report my results.

ANYWAYS, after reading that meringue doesn’t like peppermint oil and realising that the essence I was going to use contains it, I’ve been trying my hardest to find a place (online) that sells artificial peppermint flavouring that DOESN’T contain peppermint oil. I can’t seem to find any. Not many places sell the essence, and if they do they never mention the ingredients. I plan to check gourmet food stores tomorrow morning, but until then, I only have my imagination.
I’ve come up with one suggestion to solve this peppermint meringue problem, and I wanted to ask your opinion;

The meringue mixture is affected if the peppermint oil is added when the meringue is being whipped. So we can’t flavour the meringue at that stage. The idea of putting peppermint in the ganache is a cool idea, but I’m not sandwiching my meringues and I’m not using ganache so that option wouldn’t work for me. What if the meringues were flavoured with peppermint AFTER they were baked? The only way to do it would be to make a little spray bottle of peppermint essence (perhaps mixed with water?) and then the meringues would be lightly sprayed with the liquid after they’ve been baked and cooled.
Obviously, the liquid would soak into the meringue a bit and it could possibly make the meringue soggy. But it might not be so bad? A little spritz of peppermint spray might do the trick?

What does everyone think of this suggestion? I haven’t worked with meringue that much (despite being a pastry chef) so I’m not sure how it will go. I’d love to try it right now but I’ve been awake almost 24 hours now.

Any ideas on my idea? :P
PS one other option is to sprinkle peppermint flavoured sprinkles on top before baking. I found some little white balls by wilton; it’s a cool idea but I’d rather the meringue was flavoured personally :)