Recipe: Mince Pies

After 4 Salvadoran recipes, I wanted to send you off for Christmas with a great South African holiday recipe:  Mince Pies!

These delectable little beauties were a complete revelation to me.  Not often that you get introduced to a whole new kind of dessert.  Mince pies, where have you been all my life?  They are like part cookie, part tart, part pie.  And all mini sized!

The beauty of them is that you can fill them with lots of different things.  The traditional filling is made of apples, raisins, marmalade and citrus zest.  They sell it ready made here in South Africa:

But you can fill it with whatever you'd like.  Gill and I had a whole afternoon of baking the other day, and made 5 unique fillings.  So the only strict part of this recipe is the crust, which is the one that Gill and her mom have been using for decades!

Glass Family Pie Crust Recipe:

1 cup (250 grams) sugar
3 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt

1 cup (250 grams) butter
2 eggs, beaten

Method:
Mix dry ingredients together with a fork.

Cut butter into flour mixture.  Add eggs.  Knead together.  Roll out thin (as if for pie crust).  Line each individual pie well.  Fill with mixture.  Cover with crust top, crimp and poke a small hole in each.  Bake (350F/175C) for 15 minutes, or until top is golden.  Dust with icing sugar.

** Joyce (Gill's mom) notes that for a savory crust, you can substitute the sugar with 1 cup of grated cheese, plus add a pinch of cayenne pepper.

As far as what to bake them in, I got so lucky ... went to the flea market and found two mince pie tins for 10 Rand!  That's like $1.15!  But as you're not likely to find them easily in the States, I found you all a baking tin that will work on Amazon.

Now, as far as the fillings go, it's easy!  Just play around with dried/stewed fruits, nuts, jams, spreads, etc. What you're looking for is a jam-like consistency.  We didn't have recipes for any of the fillings, we just experimented.

Here is one of our favorites:  Dried apricots, glace cherries and peach jam:

Others that we made were:

• Nutella, chocolate chips and glace cherries
• Caramel and apple
• Nutella, peanut butter and marshmallow fluff  (These ones were like crack!)
• Plain apricot jam
• Dried pears, vanilla, rough chopped pistachios and cinnamon.  The pears were rather hard, so to make it more "jammy" in consistency we stewed all the ingredients together in a little boiling water for a few minutes.  These were my favorites.

Here are the traditional mince pies:

Here are the chocolate-cherry ones, oh, and since these were had un-traditional fillings, we went with un-traditional tops (cut out with tiny cookie cutters):

Apricot-Cherry:

Pear-Pistachio:

I didn't get photos of the other ones, but rest assured, they were adorable and oh, SO good. 

So with that my lovelies, I finish a week's worth of holiday feast making!

I wish all of you the very merriest of Christmases, surrounded by your loved ones and filled with joy, peace ... and of course, lots of yummy things to eat!

XOXO and big Christmas hugs to you all,
Lorena