Mince Pies

This morning, our family were doing their best to appear holy by attending our local Catholic mass. The children wriggled, the hymns were quietly sung off key, and as we finished, the priest issued welcomes to all the prodigal children come home, instructing them to come to teas, coffees, and cake after the service so that he could chat to them. This was met by whispering and huge gesticulations.
"Oh," he said as his face fell. "No coffee and cake?" He paused, looking around, his eyes pleading to be told otherwise. "Well, that's ruined my Sunday." He blessed us and we shuffled out into the cold December air.

It does seem odd, with Christmas being such a food centred holiday, that such an opportunity to issue baked goods to the masses was missed. The organisers assumed that the congregation would want to rush off to purchase pigs in blankets, to wrap their last few presents, rather than enjoy a few moments with each other on this holy weekend. The out of town relatives gathered outside for a brief moment, murmuring their disappointment, then vanished around the corner into their respective vehicles, a few declaring they would try the nearby coffee shop that had opened recently.

As we watched them disappear, we sighed. We are having a quiet Christmas this year, so I am not rushing about. There is no bedding to organise, no extra guests to cater for, no car to pack up. Just the five of us trying not to kill each other.

I say no extra guests to cater for, but there is one exception: Father Christmas. As a child, I usually left out a cookie or two for Santa, with milk to wash it down, plus a carrot and perhaps some nuts and raisins for Rudolph. Here, it appears that Father Christmas has somewhat more sophisticated tastes, preferring mince pies to cookies, and whisky or sherry to milk. Rudolph likes carrots the world round, it seems.

The end result

In the past, I have always been content to buy the pies, having never tasted a bad supermarket one. I mean, Mr Kipling does make exceedingly good cakes. But on Friday, when I asked the kids what they wanted to do THAT WAS FREE this Christmas holiday, Christopher piped up that we wanted to do some cooking. Plus, having been in on a mums Christmas conversation recently with a couple mothers who do ALL the things, I had a few tips on what to do to make mince pies tasty, namely scooping mincemeat from a shop-bought jar and adding a couple extra ingredients to pimp up your pies. So I figured, why not? This year, we would make Santa's snack from scratch. Sort of.

Mincemeat taken to the next level

So Lidl provided the jar of Brandy-laced mincemeat, into which I grated a wrinkly apple and to which I added the last few pistachios out of a packet, the zest of a clementine, the zest of half a lemon, and a handful of tired looking sultanas. "That looks disgusting!" my daughter exclaimed. I can't say I disagreed with her. I mean, look at it.

I made the pastry, and rolled it out, trying to keep the kids' fingers off of it. You know how occasionally, just occasionally, you go through your cupboards to clear out things you don't really need? Well, recently I did just that and looked critically at a range of circle cutters that I hadn't taken out in at least a year. I kept them in the end, and now I can fully justify retaining them in my kitchen cupboards of doom, because they were officially used for something culinary in 2017! An official stay of execution for these beasts.

Ok, so I should have used the crinkly side for both the bottom and the tops of the pies. And not let these two anywhere near:

Catherine loves the camera on her phone that doesn't work as a phone in this country.

Their presence is why I don't have any photos of the filling of the pies. No, they couldn't have taken photos, be quiet.

The jar stretched to 12 pies, the pastry covered them all quite happily with some scraps left in the fridge to be found months from now after they have been slowly edged to the back by other, more recently used items.

Into a hot oven they went for 17 minutes, and when they came out they were easily extracted from the muffin pan to cool on a rack where Robert stared at them suspiciously.

This was only the second time I'd ever made mince pies, and the last time I used puff pastry. I prefer shortcrust pastry fo sho. 

It quickly became apparent that none of my children wanted to actually eat any mince pies. Christopher had made mixed berry muffins this morning (under my supervision from across the room) which they all preferred to re-attack rather than sample any of my pastries.

Well, someone had to try them, and Michael was asleep.

None of the china matches, as I am really good at breaking stuff. Expert level.

It was most satisfactory.

So if you need a pie to leave out for Father Christmas, drop me a line. I've got 10 to spare. 

Hope you all have a Happy Christmas!

Recipe:

1 recipe shortcrust pastry (I use Joy of Cooking's recipe, but you could just buy some)
1 jar mincemeat
1 small apple
zest from 1 clementine
zest from 1 lemon
handful of shelled pistachios
handful of sultanas or raisins
Any other exciting ingredients that work in a mince pie.
Caster sugar

Preheat oven to 220C Roll out pastry, cut with circle cutter big enough to fill the middle and sides of a muffin tin. Fill a dozen wells, then pop the muffin tray in the fridge while you work on the mincemeat. Empty the jar into a bowl, then peel and grate the apple into it, and add the rest of the ingredients, giving it a quick stir. Take the muffin tray out, then fill them with even amounts of the mixture. Cut out circles, stars, whatever for tops of the pies. Listen to your daughter complain that they aren't pretty enough and don't have a fancy design. Mutter to yourself as you sprinkle sugar over the pies, then put in the oven for 15-20 minutes, turning halfway through. Remove from tin and put onto cooling rack, then make some tea and eat one. Keep one aside for Santa, and dispose of the rest however you see fit.

Sweet and Strong Hare

On Saturday mornings, when all in my household are well and the weather is not too horrific, you will find me at our local farmers' market. It is a relatively small affair, with only some 30 or so stalls in total on a busy week, but there you can find items you really can't find easily in your local supermarket. The vegetables are ugly and obscure, the eggs don't just come from hens, and the hand crafted items are, well, very obviously hand crafted, shall we say.

The main draw for me is the meat. Puddledub bacon is the best bacon you'll find in Scotland. Really. And you can get great other cuts of really good meat at far cheaper prices than the butcher would offer for the same stuff. For example, the chickens I buy there I pay about £10 for (which is still pricey compared to a supermarket factory farmed bird, I know) but at the butcher's the same bird will cost you £25.

The first time I tried hare was when my husband brought home a bloody, skinned carcass from the farm where he worked and announced it would be dinner. I was skeptical, but he prepared jugged hare it was, indeed, very flavourful. Hares are far bigger than rabbits, so you really get a good amount of meat off of one of these violent creatures.

My preferred recipe now is one found in a book my mother sent me, an Italian cookbook named The Silver Spoon, which is some kind of Italian institution (or so its cover tells me). Its secret ingredient is chocolate - a small amount is all you need to add complexity and depth to the sauce enveloping the hare. You basically just slowly simmer the meat in some booze and stock until it is tender, then add sultanas and simmer some more, then some nuts, dark chocolate, vinegar and a tiny bit of sugar. Once that all comes together, it's easiest to just remove all the meat and put it in the sauce for simple serving, which we did alongside some roast potatoes and cauliflower in cheese sauce. No calories were counted in the creation of this meal.

For a good cauliflower cheese I recommend you try Nigella Lawson's recipe. For the next time you bag yourself a hare, try this recipe below:

Sweet and Strong Hare

from The Silver Spoon

serves 6-8

Ingredients:

2 Tbsp olive oil

25g butter

40g smoked bacon bits

1 hare, cut into pieces

2 Tbsp plain flour

175ml red wine

175ml meat stock

1 bay leaf

50g sultanas

25g pine nuts or sliced almonds

25g plain chocolate, grated

1 tsp white wine vinegar

t tsp sugar

salt and pepper

Method:

Heat the olive oil and butter in a pan, add the bacon bits and hare and cook over a medium heat, turning and stirring frequently, until the pieces of hare are browned all over. Season with salt and pepper, sprinkle with half the flour, mix well and cook for about 10 minutes. Pour in the wine and stock, add the bay leaf, lower the heat and simmer for about 1 1/2 hours. Meanwhile, put the sultanas in a bowl, add warm water to cover, and leave to soak for 15 minutes, then drain and squeeze out. Stir the sultanas and pine nuts into the pan and simmer for a further 30 minutes. Mix together the chocolate, the remaining flour, the vinegar, sugar and a pinch of salt in a bowl, then stir in 3-4 Tbsp water. Pour the mixture into the pan and bring just to the boil. Taste and add more salt if necessary. Serve the hare covered in this ancient chocolate sauce. 

Carrot Cake

When my brothers and I were little people, my mom used to cook and bake for us a fair amount, making a variety of different dishes and treats. As the years passed, and she returned to full time employment, she continued to cook regularly but the baking, well the baking held little interest for her anymore. She had other things to get done, quite frankly. 

But there was one treat she used to make occasionally, and never from a box mix: carrot cake. Oh, we tried the box mix, but it was far too inferior to the real thing to consider even calling it by the same name. The carrot didn't look like real carrot, and it certainly wasn't real cream cheese in the icing. A poor imitation to be sure.

Whenever my mother's rota came at work for her to bring in a treat for the staff room she always made this. We were always slightly resentful of this fact, because she would slave and swear over it, being out of the habit of baking now, but we would rarely get to taste it. The completed dish would be put in the fridge overnight and whisked away to the teacher's lounge at her school the next day. She would bring the empty carcass of a dish home the next day, smiling triumphantly. "It disappeared within a couple hours!" she would boast as she put the pan into the dishwasher. We vultures hoping for crumbs would slink away upstairs, cursing the teachers who had stolen what we considered to be OUR cake.

The recipe was from a battered old book from my nursery school, a fundraising effort by the mothers when they asked all the mums to contribute their favourite recipe. A slim volume, we lost it several times but eventually found it again. When the 21st century arrived, I made sure to have this recipe emailed to me so as not to ever lose it again.

I have adapted it over the years, but at its core it remains the same. I added pineapple where none existed originally and spiced it up a bit further, and I do have to adjust it slightly to fit UK ingredients. The original recipe works great in North America, but we are unable to get block cream cheese here so more butter is necessary in the icing in order to ensure it does not end up too runny, I also find it ends up denser here with UK flour than in in the USA - I have no idea why. 

On this occasion I was making it for a church gathering, so my 9 X 13 dish was more suitable to make it a tray bake like affair, but you could make it in a couple 8 inch round pans and stack them on top of each other. The choice is yours.

In order to have everything in grabbing distance, I assembled the goods. This isn't a recipe I make on a whim, as I usually don't have sufficient carrots, cream cheese, and pineapple to make it without shopping specially for it.

First I made up the flour mix. I used to skip this step, wanting to save on washing up by just adding the dry ingredients all together later and stirring them into the egg mixture. However, occasionally I encountered an unsavoury problem: green carrot. After a day or two, some of the carrot in the cake would go green, making it look slightly alarming and toxic. This would happen even when I stored the cake carefully in the fridge. Eventually, thanks to nigella.com, I learned this is what can happen if you have either too much baking powder or it isn't distributed evenly into the mixture: it's just a chemical reaction between the raising agent and the carrot, nothing poisonous, just freaky looking. So now I make sure to be real careful like when measuring the raising agents for this, and I do the flour mix ahead so I can be sure to mix everything together. So in went flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and a few spices, one of which was allspice. I find it confusing that allspice and mixed spice are both sold and are completely different. 

Once I'd mixed that I set it aside and thought I'd be real clever by putting the pineapple through the small grater on my food processor. This was not as smart an idea as I thought:

So I put in the blade to mash it up a bit more. You could just buy a small shredded pineapple if you are stateside, but I've not found it here so it becomes a DIY job.

That's better. I then put it into a measuring cup. No, I didn't rinse the cup out first.

Then I peeled and shredded carrots until I had 4 cups of shredded mixture. It's important to get your five a day.

Finally it was time to move on to the oil and sugar. For some reason it looks like a gooey green monster here.

I added four eggs.  And yes, stir them in one at a time, because in a controlled experiment Cooks Illustrated found it was actually better for your cake to do so. Here went the first.

And then went the others followed by just a touch of Costco vanilla.

And then in went the flour mix to be folded in.

Last but not least went in the carrots, pineapple, and some sultanas that I tried to, er, chop with the food processor. I managed to chop some of the shredded carrot still in the food processor but not the sultanas. Oh well, at worst they all sink to the bottom of the cake.

Some people put nuts in their carrot cake. They are wrong.

It makes an ungodly looking mixture, but baking will make it better.

It might be necessary to repeat that to yourself a few times as you put it in the pan. I put loads of paper up the sides to make it easy to pull out and slice later.

See, it looks better now, doesn't it?

The next morning I made the icing. I would have liked to do at soon as the cake was cooled, but there wasn't room in my fridge to put the completed product in overnight, and I didn't want the icing sitting out overnight. I did, however leave the ingredients overnight at room temperature, as coldness is the enemy of this icing. You'll soon see why...

All I did was combine icing sugar, butter, cream cheese, and vanilla and stir them with my hand mixer.

And look what I got! A lumpy mess. I have come to realise this is a result of things not being quite warm enough. Even left overnight, my kitchen was too cold for things to happily blend together. Into the microwave it went for a ten second blast.

My adoring fans looked on.

After that quick burst of heat, it blended up all creamy like. I had a LOT of lumpy batches of icing over the years before I figured out that trick.

"Mama, you one clever lady!" is what he meant to say. It came out as "AAAM!"

Now time for the two parts to meet. As you can see, the cake came out of the tin easily in one quick lift.

Which made it easy to cut into slabs.

And easy to lift these slabs into their tins en masse. Here they are, nestled inside.

Now I could have iced them, then cut them and put them in, but that ends up a bit messy. So instead, once they were in the transportation tin, I put the icing into a ziplock bag.

And then put a blob of icing on each of the pieces. It could have been prettier, to be sure, but I had to make a batch of cardamom buns as well so I was in a bit of a rush. Anyway, it means they transport easily and are easy to remove without sticky hands everywhere.

There were no survivors. I get a LOT of requests for this recipe, so here it is:

CARROT CAKE

Cake:

2 cups plain flour

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda

1 tsp salt

1/4 tsp allspice

1/4 tsp ground nutmeg

pinch ground cloves

1 tsp cinnamon

1 1/2 cup caster sugar

1 cup vegetable oil

4 eggs 

1/2 tsp vanilla

1/2 cup shredded pineapple

3 1/2 cups shredded carrot

1/2 cup sultanas

Icing:

225 g cream cheese

140 g unsalted butter

2 cups icing sugar

2 tsp vanilla

Preheat oven to 180C/350F and position rack in centre of oven. Line a 9"X13"pan or alternatively line two 8" round cake tins. Sift flour, baking powder, soda, salt, and spices together and set aside. In large bowl, beat sugar and oil together. Add eggs one at a time. Add vanilla. Fold in dry ingredients then stir in carrots, pineapple, and sultanas. Pour into pan and start checking at 30 minutes, though it may need as much as 40. 

Once cake is cool, blend icing ingredients together with electric beaters if possible and spread on cake as desired.