Christmas special #9: Mince pies



Photo by Elena Heatherwick

It really is very Stepford to make your own mince pies, so this one is for home baking enthusiasts only. Or for anyone who basically never, ever sees their family or does any cooking and is desperately trying to over-compensate.

Anyway having said all that mince pies are really easy. I do my mince pies in a slightly controversial way, in that I make them quite small and I make them with puff pastry and not shortcrust pastry.

I'm sure you all know the difference, but for any newcomers, puff pastry is like what vol-au-vents and savoury pie toppings are usually made off - sort of flaky n stuff know what I'm saying? And shortcrust pastry is what you get in a quiche, or on top of a fruit pie.

You can make up a quantity of puff pastry using Hugh F-W's recipe, which I've written about, with photographs, in this post: http://reciperifle.blogspot.com/2010/11/mrs-corens-chicken-pie.html

That makes quite a lot. Even though you can just wrap up the leftovers and put in the freezer for another time, if you don't want that much puff pastry hanging about, then make it in half or even quarter quantities.

To assemble the mince pies you will need:

1 fairy cake tray
1 jar of mincemeat - I get mine from WAITROSE - one 410g jar of mincemeat will do about a dozen small pies.
1 quantity puff pastry
pastry cutters of your choice. I put stars on mine because I put stars on everything. I even have some stars tattooed on my person - although I'm in the middle of trying to get them taken off because tattoos are just like SO over
1 beaten egg to glaze
icing sugar

1 Roll out your pastry quite thin, like 3 mm, as it will puff up on cooking

2 Grease your fairy cake tin thoroughly as what will happen otherwise is that the mincemeat will bubble up and over the top of your pastry and superglue the little buggers to the tray and you will have to chip them out with a hammer and chisel

3 Cut out with a round cutter your pie bases and settle them into the fairy cake dips, fill with mincemeat and lay the festively-shaped lid of your choosing on top. Brush with eggwash

4 Bake in a 180C oven for 25 minutes

5 Eat hot, or reheat for 10 mins before eating and dust with icing sugar.

Christmas special #8: Christmas biscuits



Photo by Elena Heatherwick. Decorations by Recipe Rifle

Another Jamie Oliver recipe. The dough quantity here makes loads of biscuits - at least 30 depending on how big your biscuit cutters are.

I decorated these using Dr Oetker's writing icing, available from Waitrose, but any writing icing, sprinkles, or silver ball decorations will do.

So here we go:

210g plain flour
pinch salt
1tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp mixed spice
1 tsp bicarb soda
125g butter, cubed
100g sugar
1 egg
4 tbsp warm golden syrup

1 Preheat oven to 190C or 180 for fan ovens.

2 Mix together the first 6 dry ingredients. I recently learnt that swizzling dry ingredients with a whisk does pretty much the same job as sieving.

3 Rub in the butter with your fingertips until the mixture is crumby then add the egg and the syrup and mix with a spoon - not a fork or a whisk or it'll all get stuck between the spikes and drive you mental.

4 You ought to have a fairly soft dough by now, depending on how accurately you manage to measure out your syrup. Too much syrup - very easily done - and you'll have to compensate with a bit more flour.

This dough at the best of times is quite soft and fragile. It breaks away and flops out of shape quite easily - so don't lose heart if you only manage to get 2 out of every 3 dough-shapes safely onto your baking tray. A useful tool to have at hand is a fish slice or any other slim, flat metallic thing to slide your shapes off the worktop.

This dough rises a bit, so best to roll it out quite thin - about 2-3mm. If you want to use these as tree decorations, poke a hole in the top before baking.

5 These biscuits are incredibly sensitive to individual oven strengths. Mine has a fan and is brand new and is a very unsubtle creature - she is the BA Baracus of ovens - and so I only needed to do these biscuits for 5 mins at 180C.

Your oven will be different. So my advice is to start off by baking one or two biscuits at 190 for 10 minutes and take it from there. What you're looking for is a nice golden colour but a still a fraction of give in the middle of the biscuit. When they come out of the oven, they will still be squidgy and will harden on cooling, so wait 5 mins before testing their done-ness.

Decorate when cool.

A note: Babies seem to go completely nuts for these, especially those teething. It's the ginger or something - and the fact that if you drool a lot over them they turn into a sort of cakey consistency. If you wanted to do them especially for a baby, you could halve the quantity of sugar, (or cut it out completely depending on how sensitive you are about that sort of thing), and then cut them out quite thick, like a rusk.

Christmas Recipes Starters & Canapés Melon & Prosciutto skewers

Starters & Canapés: Melon & Prosciutto skewers

Recipe type: canapé, appetiser, hors d’oeuvre
Prep time:  15 mins
Total time:  15 mins
Serves: Makes 15 skewers

Ingredients

- 1 large fresh melon (spanspek), cut into cubes
- 70g Prosciutto

to serve

Balsamic reduction (optional)

Instructions

Tear the prosciutto into thin strips.
Thread the prosciutto and melon cubes onto cocktail skewers.
Place on a serving platter of your choice and drizzle with Balsamic reduction (optional).
Serve immediately (once the Balsamic reduction has been drizzled on top).
Source : Here

Delicious Crustless Vanilla Cheesecake

Delicious Crustless Vanilla Cheesecake

Some time ago I tried to make this recipe, and the results are quite satisfactory. it's really delicious. if you want to try to make this delicious cake? let's make it a Crustless Vanilla Cheesecake.