Now we’re approaching the Christmas season, it’s time to dig out the festive recipes.  Children love getting involved, and this simplest Christmas recipe I know.

Sticky mince pies – sticky, because when kids fill the pie they are usually very generous (not like shop-bought), so the mixture tends to coat the outside of the pie as well, making them, well, sticky.

Ingredients

• Mince pie filling
• Pastry (you can use puff pastry or short pastry)
• some milk
• a little flour

Time to make – about 45 minutes (25 mins cooking, 20 minutes to prepare, cleaning up time variable)

The other things you’ll need are a cup-cake baking tray, a pastry brush and something to grease the muffin or cupcake baking  tray (butter paper is easy to use for this).  You’ll need a rolling pin to roll out the pastry.

To cut the pies you can use pastry cutters or glasses. The big glass is for cutting the bottom and the smaller glass is to make the lid.

The quantities shown here will make 24~to 32 pies depending on how thinly you roll the pastry

Steps

Put a small amount of flour onto the surface you’re working on so that the pastry doesn’t stick when you roll it out.

Use the butter paper (or a small amount of butter) to grease the baking tray.

Roll the pastry until it is about 3~4mm thick.

Use the cutters to cut the bottom of pies out from the pastry and gently press them into the tray.

If they have been cut a bit unevenly, gently use your fingers to bring the top of the pastry up to the top of the tray.

Cut out the tops of the pies using the smaller cutter or glass.

Now the first sticky bit; drop about a teaspoon of filling into each pie. Don’t be stingy.  When  kids do this, you know you’ll have a generous filling

Using the pastry brush, brush some milk around the edge of each lid.  This will be the underside of the lid. The milk helps “glue” the top and bottom together.

Another messy job kids enjoy.

Place the lid on each pie and using a fork, press the lid on the base all around.

This will stop them exploding completely.

If you’ve got some left over pastry , you can roll this flat and make little decorations for the top (flowers, initials etc).

Finally, piece each lid two or three times with a sharp knife and use the pastry brush to brush the rest of the milk on to the top.  This will give them a nice golden brown colour.

Place in a pre-heated oven at 180deg Celcius for 25 minutes (or until the top is brown and the filling is bubbling out).

Take out of the oven and place on a cooling tray to cool off a bit. You can eat them hot, but be careful because the filling will be very hot.

Of course they’re sticky, very few of them escaped having an “exploding” filling.

 Notes

If you use puff pastry, make sure you roll it out to about 3~4mm think. Any thicker and it may not cook completely, and also because it expands when it cooks, if it is too think you’ll end up with empty pies.

You can dust with icing sugar before serving, but the mince is already quite sweet and so I prefer not to do this.

Cost

I got the ingredients from Sainsbury’s . The puff pastry pastry was £1.10 for 500gms and the large jar of mincemeat (822gm) was £1.80.