I'm Andy, one of those new fangled stay-at-home dads and I rather foolishly agreed to write a piece about making mince pies without really thinking it through. I figured it can't be that difficult with help from my two little monkeys Jessica (nearly 5) and George (23 months) and besides we have a large jar of mincemeat left over from a couple of years ago when I made a gallon of the stuff on a whim. I'd include the recipe for
mincemeat here but I pretty much made it up as I went along and have forgotten the ingredients apart from the fruit from a bottle of homemade damson gin.
There's two stages to destroying the kitchen in the interest of pies: making the pastry and the rolling out assembly bit, so I arranged everything for stage one whilst the kids were distracted arguing over a library book.
This shortcrust pastry is based on the one my late Nana made but now it's in metric. You'll need 150g butter (room temperature), 50g margarine (plus a handful more to grease the tins and the floor), 400g self raising flour (plus lots more for rolling out and getting everywhere) and about 5 tablespoons of cold water but this has never been an exact science for me.
CHRISTMAS
BAKE-OFF
Mince pies with Andy, Jessica and George. Recipe makes about 20