Mincemeat and mince pies

It is easy to buy mincemeat (or even the complete mince pies). But if you have to buy the ingredients for the rest of the Christmas recipes, then it's easy to mix up the left-overs for some mincemeat. Scroll down for a recipe for mince pies.

Ingredients
dried fruit
glacé cherries
some candied peel
dark brown sugar
suet
spices: nutmeg, mace
brandy or other (optional)
lemon juice (optional)

Equipment

mixing bowl
spoon
jam jar with lid

preparation time:
mixing ingredients
leave: up to four weeks (optional)

Cooking process

Cut up any ingredients that need it (but not too small) such as the candied peel and the glacé cherries. Measure the ingredients and mix them. Add enough liquid (brandy or other spirit, or lemon juice, or both) to moisten the mix.
Clean the jam jar with hot water. Put the mincemeat in the jar and put the lid on.
Keep until Christmas, then use it to make mince pies.

Other ideas

This will improve with a few weeks keeping. The alcohol helps to preserve it. When you cook it, the alcohol will be driven off. I tend to make it after making the as it helps to use up some of the left-over ingredients. The amounts of ingredients are quite variable. This amount tends to fill up a jam jar (although mysteriously the same jam jar seems to take more or less each year!) and also fits in with what I have left after making the Christmas pudding and Christmas cake. However, you can vary the ingredients quite a bit.
Some people add a chopped apple, and I'm sure there are other variants.
The suet is a type of beef fat. Originally mince pies were really made of minced meat, and the suet is the last memory of this, so I like to include it. However, you can leave it out completely (not even replacing it with another fat). There is also vegetarian suet as an alternative.

Mince pies

Ingredients
a jar of mincemeat
butter
sugar
plain flour
a teaspoon cinnamon
egg
water or milk if necessary

Equipment

mixing bowl
spoon
knife
tart tin
small spoon
pastry cutters (optional)

oven:
time in oven: 20 mins

preparation time:
rubbing fat into flour
roll out and cut pastry

Cooking process

Measure out the , sugar and spice, and then . Mix in the egg. If , add a little milk or water, but be careful not to add too much.
and cut out rounds. Put them in the tart tin. Put a small spoonful of mincemeat in each one (don't overfill!) Cut a smaller round to put on top. A little water acts as glue to stick the top and bottom together. As you can see from the photo above, I ran out of mincemeat (I'd already made some mince pies), so I made jam tarts with the rest of the pastry. Same principle, but jam instead of mincemeat and no top.
Put the tin in the oven. This needs to cook for about 20 minutes. When cooked, check to see if the mincemeat has come out of the pies (like mine!). If this happens, get the pies out of the tin straight away. If the sugary mixture cools down, it will harden, and it will be hard to remove the pies. Unfortunately, the pies are fragile when just cooked, so it can be tricky to get them out of the tin. A spoon can be useful to lever them and lift them out carefully.
You can eat the pies when hot, or leave them to cool and eat them cold, or reheat them. You can eat them with brandy butter (prise open the top of the pie and put the brandy butter inside).

Other ideas

One problem with this pastry recipe is the egg. That means that you have to make this amount (which is quite a lot of pastry) or have egg left over. I suspect it isn't necessary. Use twice as much weight of flour as butter (careful if you're using cups! The proportions are different because that is volume, not weight). Use just milk to mix into a dough. You can add sugar or spice to the dough if you want, but mincemeat is already very sweet, and has spices.
The photo shows mince pies with tops which are sealed. You can also do shapes (if you have cutters), such as stars. Or you can leave them as open tarts. I think this is prettier. Also, it uses less pastry, so you get more mince pies for the same amount of pastry, and when you eat them, there is also less pastry (which can be boring if too much!) But there is a slight problem. Mincemeat contains suet and sugar. When cooked, this turns into toffee. If the contents overfill the tart case and the lid isn't sealed to the base, then this toffee tends to overflow, and stick the tart to the tray. Solutions: Don't overfill the tart case. Or if you have, and this happens, remove the mince pies from the case immediately they're cooked. The toffee is still soft from cooking then, and hopefully you can remove them OK. Use a spoon (see above). When washing the tray, remember that cooked sugar sets very hard, but dissolves in water. So soak the tray first.