The little cookery book written by my grandfather to immortalise his favourite meals goes something like this: Combine the fat and flour and rub together until it looks like breadcrumbs. Add a little water at a time and gently mix together, adding more water as needed until it comes together to form a heavy dough. Bag it and refrigerate for an hour and then allow to warm back up to room temperature before rolling. So far, so good, but it doesn't mention small children so we'll improvise and tried not to shout too much. We soon needed the dustpan and brush but something resembling play-dough was reached without too much drama and into the fridge it went.
After lunch and a nice long nap for George, I pulled the pastry to warm, set the oven to 150ºC and collected all that we would need for the fun bit. I tried George on greasing the tins while I divided the dough and gave each child a cutter and some pastry to roll out. Jess did a good job of cutting after a few false starts but George gave up greasing the tins and indeed using the cutter, and was instead distributing blobs of pastry into his tray.
Jess was ready to assemble so I showed her how to line the tin with little circles of pastry and fill each one with a teaspoon of mincemeat and then left her to get on with it while I reset George and got him to the filling stage. Jess did really well and was ready for the lids so I cracked an egg and got the pastry brush so that Jess could glue them on and glaze the top.
Meanwhile George tasted the mincemeat, decided it wasn't very nice, figured his pies would be better without it and is now shouting for the brush that Jess is still using. By this point I'd pretty much had enough of juggling two kids and all the mess so sped up the process and assembled George's pies so he could glaze the tops with the eggy brush.
Amazingly we had made pies that looked like pies! Into the oven they went and after cleaning the now very dusty kids and as much of the kitchen as I could be bothered, it was telly time for them and a well earned cuppa and a sit down for me. The pies took about 20mins in the oven and turned out really well despite the pastry being a bit thick.