Christmassy Creations: Mince Pies

I hope you all had very merry Christmas' filled with lots of good food and wine - I certainly did!

Last week, to get into the festive spirit, I started my seasonal baking. So in the first of this two part post, I will show you how to make Mince Pies!


Mince Pies

For short crust pastry, I always like to use the BBC Food recipe, which I find produces the best pastry (Here's the LINK or if you prefer I've printed it below) but if you can't be bothered, then you can always use frozen!

Ingredients

• 125g/4oz plain flour
  

• pinch of salt
  

• 55g/2oz butter, cubed

• 30-45ml/2-3 tbsp cold water

Method

1. Put the flour and salt in a large bowl and add the cubes of butter.

2. Use your fingertips to rub the butter into the flour until you have a mixture that resembles coarse breadcrumbs with no large lumps of butter remaining. Try to work quickly so that it does not become greasy.

3. Using a knife, stir in just enough of the cold water to bind the dough together.

4. Wrap the dough in clingfilm and chill for 10-15 minutes before using.

5. Alternatively using a food processor, put the flour, butter and salt in the food processor and pulse until the fat is rubbed into the flour.

6. With the motor running, gradually add the water through the funnel until the dough comes together. Only add enough water to bind it and then stop.

7. Wrap the dough in clingfilm as before and chill for 10-15 minutes before using.

So that's the Pastry...

- After these stages are complete, take the dough from the fridge and roll on a lightly floured surface until about 5mm thick.

- Cut out rolled dough with a circular cutter (these will form the base of each pie) and place each circle into a section of a pre-greased bun tray.

- For the filling you can either make your own, or if you're like me, you can buy it from the supermarket - For these I used Waitrose's own mincemeat and I can highly reccommend it! So whatever filling you have, take it and fill the little pastry cases.

- Next the tops. Take the left over pastry and re roll it and cut using a holly stencil so that each pie has two holly leaves for topping.

- Place the 'leaves' on top and finish with a pastry berry.

- Brush tops with milk or beaten egg and put in the oven at 180C (FAN) for 20 minutes.

- Leave to cool for 15 minutes and enjoy!


So that's how you make mince pies - If you give the recipe a go, let me know how they turn out, in the meantime look out for my follow up blog post on my Christmas Cupcakes!

Happy Holidays and Happy Baking!

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