My mince pie experiments

I love the flavours of Christmas and I especially love the fruitcake my mother makes.  But seeing that she has long perfected the art of fruitcake baking, I had to try something different to get in the mood for Christmas. 

I found a recipe for mince tartlets in Maggie Beer's book - Maggie's Table, where you actually have to make the fruit mince yourself, instead of using the ready made mincemeat - so it was an obvious choice.  What I like about the recipe is that it needs no cooking and that it does not use suet.  Way back when, fruit mince also contained meat and most recipes still calls for suet, but this one only uses melted butter.  In the recipe she mentions that she normally makes 36 mini muffin-sized tartlets, but it turns out that the quantity fruit mince is way more than that.  I ended up with around 2 kg of fruit mince! That's when I decided to experiment with a few different recipes.

Although Maggie Beer calls her pastry "to die for and perfect", Nigella Lawson's Frangipane Mince Pies, won hands down!  Her pastry includes ground almonds and the fruit mince filling is topped with frangipane.  They look lovely and tastes wonderful, and is actually quite straight forward to make.
 (I also tried shortbread pillows and a tray bake crumble for an Australian Woman's Weekly Cookbook)

So, first Nigella's recipe, and then my version of Maggie's fruit mince (reduced...)

For the pastry:

175 g flour

30 g ground almonds

65 g icing sugar

pinch of salt

125 g cold butter, diced

1 egg, whisked with 2 T of ice cold water

Place the flour, almonds and icing sugar in a food processor and pulse to combine.  Add the butter and process to a crumbly mix.  Now add the egg/water in a drizzle, down the funnel pulsing as you do so, until the pastry comes together.  Press to form a cohesive dough, divide into two flat discs, wrap in clingfilm and rest in the fridge for 30 minutes.

In  the meantime make the frangipane topping:

2 large eggs

90 g caster sugar

90 g butter, melted

90 g ground almonds

Whisk the eggs and sugar, then stir int he butter and almonds.  Set aside.

To assemble you also need 200 g fruit mince and 4 tablespoons of flaked almonds.

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees.

Roll out the first pastry disc, to a thickness of 3mm and stamp out 12 circles slightly larger than the tart indentations.  Press gently into the tin, and return to the fridge for 15 minutes.  Repeat with the other half of the pastry.

Put a teaspoon of fruit mince into each and top with a tablespoonful of frangipane.  Sprinkle with flaked almonds and bake for 15 minutes until golden brown.  Leave to cool in the tins for 5 minutes. 

If you're in the mood for some chopping then try your hand at making your own fruit mince.

400 g dried fruit selection (try to use equal quantities of the following: seedless raisins, Turkish apricots, dried figs, sultanas, currants, cranberries, cherries, mixed peel - maybe less figs, because they are expensive and also less peel, seeing that it might be to bitter)

1 Granny Smith apple

juice and zest of one orange and one lemon

120g soft brown sugar

1 T honey

1 t mixed spice

40 ml brandy

60 g butter

Finely chop all the fruit and peel and grate the apple.  Blend together the fruit and all the other ingredients, except the butter and leave at room temperature for 24 hours, stirring occasionally.  Next day, melt the butter and stir it through the fruit mince.  Keep refrigerated until ready to use.