I Love Mince Pies

An ability to produce homemade mince pie’s is a skill in other people that I greatly admire, and at the start of the year I decided I wanted to be one of these clever people and endeavoured to make my very own mince pies, from scratch, from the pastry to the mincemeat, every last bit of it would be made by my own fair hands. I talked about the hitch I had with the mincemeat, but luckily I found a Gluten-Free mincemeat recipe (god bless Nigella) which I made at the very start of November, and finally this week I decided the time was right to unite mince with pie and bake a batch. Now, while I used my own pastry for the first batch, I wanted to test the Dietary Specials roll out pastry (which is AMAZING by the way and everyone should buy it) so the pictures here are with the ready made pastry. Should you want to make your own pastry click here for the amounts, ingredients and method. I really won’t blame you if you want to use the ready made stuff, pastry, especially gluten free pastry is a colossal ball ache, throw in the pressures and tensions of Xmas you might be hitting the mulled wine at 10am.

Ingredients Makes 32 pies

• Home made or ready made pastry.
• Jar of home made or shop bought mince meat (if your buying in remember to check the label for gluten)
• 1-2 Tsp’s icing sugar
• 1-2 Tsp’s cinnamon
• I Egg
• Round and star or heart cutters
• 12 Hole cake tray

Method

• Whack your oven up high to Gas 7.
• Lightly dust your work surface and rolling pin with some plain gluten free flour and roll out your pastry, fairly thin but not drastically so, if you can see your boyfriend through it when you hold it up its probably a tad too thin.
• Cut out 12 rounds with your circular cutter, (I usually use a medium sized tumbler) and then mould gently into the holes of your cupcake tray, don’t be too over zealous moulding them in or it will be nigh on impossible trying to take them out once they’re cooked.
• Next spoon around a teaspoon and a half of your mincemeat mix into the pastry rounds you’ve just moulded.
• If you want your mince pies to have ’lids’ you’ll need to cut our a further 12 rounds and ‘glue’ them into place with some egg wash. If your making heart of star topped mince pies then cut out 12 of whichever your making and gently place them on top of your mincemeat, giving the a brush with your egg wash.
• Pop in the oven for about 10minutes, I find the ready made pastry doesn’t take quite as long as the homemade kind, and will burn quickly if you don’t keep an eye on it, so keep checking your pies every now and then.
• As soon as they’re cooked take them out of the oven and then remove the pies from the tray straight away, if you don’t they’ll carry on cooking in the tray, and burn and go all horrible and bitter and you don’t want that now do you?
• When the pies are cooled sprinkle with a little bit of icing sugar and weeny bit of cinnamon.
• Enjoy with an Eggnog while you write your Christmas cards and misspell the same persons name 4 times and have to rewrite the card again. And again.

Katie-Boo k