Mum's Mince Pies

This is a biggie for me - sharing my mum's recipe at last. And a poem for my Mum.

Making Mum’s Mince Pies

This may seem a fairly trivial thing to do, share a recipe for mince pies, but for me it is a rather big milestone in my life.

My mum was a fabulous cook, I will always be eternally grateful she passed on her love of food and cooking to me and I have written about her adventures in the kitchen and how I tried to replicate her recipes after she succumbed to dementia many times in the past.

Like a lot of cooks of her generation, many recipes for staples in the kitchen had been passed down so there was never a need to look up how to make something like a lamb hotpot, a beef stew or a rice pudding, these traditional dishes were like second nature. She didn’t have a vast library of cook books to refer to, I do remember her having a few Delia Smith books including Delia Smith’s Christmas, my go-to Christmas cook book and in my humble opinion still one of the the best available. She had a Mrs Beeton Cookery Book, several from Marks and Spencers from the days they printed their own books and a Dairy Cook Book that I still have somewhere in my shelves, I dig it out every now and then to make the Sausage Plait which is great recipe for a picnic in better weather.

I have mentioned in a previous post she collected the Family Circle Magazine which was a great source of recipes and when I was younger my dad used to bring home the Evening Standard newspaper every evening, my mum used to excitedly cut out the recipes by their many excellent columnists over the years including Fay Maschler, Delia Smith and Lindsey Bareham.

Sadly, despite all the cooking that went on in her kitchen, I only have two recipes from my mum, which are so dear to me, not just because of the recipe but because they are in her handwriting which makes them even more precious. One for a chocolate log which I make every Christmas (I panicked a little this morning when I thought I had lost it!) and one for her mince pies.

When I was a baker at Wyken, a well known local farmer’s market, I made these mince pies every Christmas to sell on my stall. I honestly couldn’t make enough of them, they sold like hotcakes and the owner of the farmer’s market, Lady Carla Carlisle, used to order them by the dozen for Christmas events both corporate and private. Each December I made hundreds and hundreds, all by hand, the kitchen resembled a mince pie factory, they were everywhere in various stages of production, from pastry resting in the fridge, to rolling out, ready to bake, in the oven or cooling on trays. As the recipe was from my mum I called them Mum’s Mince Pies and still do to this day. I have no idea where the original recipe came from but it has been around for about forty years, that’s how far back I remember my mum making them.

Up until today, I have always been very protective over the recipe, I have been asked so many times and apart from family and very good friends I have never shared it before, but now feel it is time to pass it on to the wider world. Hopefully someone else will love them as much as I do and they will continue to be made in the future. They are still by far the best mince pies I have ever tasted, the pastry is absolutely nothing like the hard stuff on shop bought pies and the sweetened cream cheese just adds a whole different layer to the taste.

Demand in my house is huge and I always give some to friends so I still make a few batches, (the recipe makes 24). If they won’t be required all at once, I put them uncooked in the tin to freeze, then once frozen release them from the tin and bag them up in freezer bags, ready to pop into the oven when I need them. They take about 20-25 mins to cook from frozen.

I always use Philadelphia cream cheese, it is more expensive than supermarket own brand but through experience I have found does work better and at this time of the year, just before Christmas it is often on special offer (it is in Sainsbury’s at the time of writing). Use a good quality jarred mincemeat if you don’t make your own. 1lb is two normal size jam jars.

Recipe for Mum’s Mince Pies
You will need 2 x 12 tart/mince pie tins

Preheat oven to 200c

8oz (225g) cream cheese
2oz (60g) caster sugar
1lb (450g) mincemeat
Icing sugar

Pastry (I make mine in a food processor which is really easy)
8oz (225g) unsalted butter
4oz (115g) lard
1lb (450g) plain flour
Finely grated rind and juice of one orange

Put the butter, lard and flour in a food processor and whizz until resembling fine breadcrumbs. Add the orange juice and zest through the tube and whizz until the dough comes together into a ball (takes about 15-20 seconds).
Take out, wrap in cling film and put in fridge to rest for half an hour. Do not leave this out as the pastry is very short and needs to be cold to roll out.

When ready, roll out to about £1 coin thickness, cut with a cutter to fill tins and make the lids (the scraps can be re-rolled).

Mix the cream cheese with the sugar. Fill the pastry cases with one teaspoon of mincemeat, top with one teaspoon of the cream cheese mixture, dampen the edges of the pastry with a little water then put on the lids to seal, gently press the edges down. Using a knife make a half inch cut in the top of the pies.

Cook for 15 mins or until golden. Leave to cool for a while in tins before lifting out to cool completely on a rack. (Or eat slightly warm, my favourite). Once cool, dust lightly with a icing sugar.

Enjoy x

I wrote this poem yesterday as I was thinking about my mum and the very happy Christmases we shared together over the years. She was a joy to be around at any time of the year but Christmas was her favourite holiday and she revelled in every single good thing the season brought with it. Even though she had suffered with dementia for many years and her last few years on earth were hardly a life, when she died she left a gaping hole and I struggled to come to terms she had gone. Four months later, on Christmas Eve my lovely dad had a bad fall and he died the day after Boxing Day so the last two Christmases have been a mix of emotions to say the least. This year things are returning to an even keel and I feel I can start celebrating this wonderful time of year again with the joy it deserves, while looking back with love and gratefulness at the happy memories I have of my parents at Christmas. So I will be making my mince pies this year with gladness in my heart, the carols will be blaring out in the kitchen and there will be a sherry on the side to toast my beautiful mum.

All Along

She is not waiting for me behind a lustrous gate
with my favourite smile and plate of freshly baked madeleines. 
My father did not somehow miraculously find her amongst
the billions of others ghosts. Not even the scent of Youth Dew could 
have guided him towards the love he woke up to every morning
for seven decades. Like him, she was gone. 
She is not looking down on me, keeping me safe
or stopping the unkindness of others from slipping
under my door. The world will do as the world will do,
no searching the heavens while waiting for a miracle 
will make life better here. I cannot reach up through
the clouds to hold her fragile hand in my fragile hand
and expect her to erase the unjust and the painful.
In July I do not imagine we will picnic again on a blanket 
by the lock, her in a blue cotton summer dress, surrounded by
laughter and punnets of sweet strawberries picked that morning.
Dancing in the December kitchen and long days spent 
Christmas shopping are mere echos now, there will be no 
more laughter while wrapping presents, drinking 
hot chocolate and singing carols terribly out of tune.
But these memories I cannot repeat, do not bring me sadness.
She left me once a while ago, I floundered like a newborn 
without a mother, without warmth, without sustenance. 
I wondered if she would ever return and now I know
she did not leave at all. She has always been here, 
me born out of her is now reversed. I carry her life in me, 
there is no weight to bear, just a lightness, a light. 
My footsteps walk in her footsteps, my thoughts are her thoughts, 
I no longer yearn for the day we will meet again as her face is
everywhere I look, in every flower, each different blue of the sky 
and every hue of yellow and red of the sunshine she was.

I hope you are beginning to feel the spirit of the season in the air and are not feeling too stressed. I have a tendency to leave everything to the last minute but I am used to that now and know everything will get done in the end and if it doesn’t, it really doesn’t matter. Nobody will notice if you haven’t made bread sauce and it’s not the end of the world if you forget the dates. Spend a bit of that superwoman energy on yourself, you deserve it.

If you do make the mince pies please let me know how you got on and what you think - obviously if you have any questions just ask!

Lots of love,

Lindsey x