Morale Boosting Mince Pies

It was the Sunday before the last working week prior to the Christmas Holiday and I was slowly starting to feel festive despite the damp weather. I decided therefore to make some Mince Pies. The soundtrack of choice for cooking was the Stone Roses Compilation The Complete Stone Roses which is an excellent overview of their work for the Silvertone Record Label and contains everything from early rather primitive efforts like 1985's 'So Young' through to more familiar, sophisticated works like 'Fools Gold', 'Mersey Paradise' and 'What the World is Waiting For'.

I found a cake tin with twelve spaces in it and greased each space with margarine as well as a sprinkling of plain flour in each. I then made some shortcrust pastry by kneading eight ounces of plain flour with four ounces of margarine until they formed a breadcrumb-like consistency and bound the crumbs together into one mass of pastry with around two tablespoons of soya milk. I then rolled out the pastry as flatly as possible   and one by one cut circles with a diameter of around six centimetres from the pastry.

I then formed them into cup shapes and added one to each of the twelve spaces in the cake tin. When I did this I pressed them against the sides of each cake tin so that the top part of the pastry cups was slightly above the top of the spaces of the cake tin.

I filled each pastry cup with enough mincemeat to reach the top of the cups while still leaving the tops of the cups exposed. In order to give an extra taste to the pies I added an eighth of a teaspoonful of dark navy rum to the mincemeat in each cup.

I took the rest of the pastry and cut out lids from it that were about five centimetres in diameter and joined the edges of the lids with the pastry edges at the top of the cups to form the pies. As I only make mince pies at this time of year the skill of successfully joining the pie lids to the pastry cups is one that is usually forgotten by the end of January and has to be re-learned the following Christmas.

Once I had manipulated the pie lids onto the top of the cups to form proper mince pies I baked in them in the fan oven at 220 degrees, 230 for non-fan ovens, for fifteen minutes after which time the pastry had turned a golden-brown colour.

After I had turned the pies out onto a wire rack and left them to cool for about half an hour I added a dusting of icing sugar to each to enhance the festive feel of the food. In recognition of the way my workmates had pulled together and worked hard during a taxing two month prior to Christmas I took the pies to work for them to sample and they were met with unanimous approval.

Lined up and ready to eat complete with a dusting of icing sugar- the taste outweighed their appearance by some way.