Hi and a huge Christmas welcome to Steve's kitchen. Today's show is brought
to you with a sprinkle of fun and a bucket full of happiness because I'm
making my second favorite mince pie. It's the sweet short crust. Now I made the, my
favorite mince pie, last week, which is the shortcrust pastry, which is not sweet.
These are really delicious by the way, I'm a little bit peculiar I like them
because they're more savory. Today is a short crust but it's a sweet more like a
shortbread. This is so delicious and if you haven't made mince pies before
you're going to be knocked out by the taste of these. I would love to actually hear
in the comments what the best mince pie you've ever had and if you decide to
make these I'd like to know what you think. We're going to start with 450
grams, that's a pound of all-purpose flour. Now this recipe actually works
well with gluten-free flour, if you want to use gluten-free go for it. The next
item is a slightly salted butter, I've got 230 grams, that's eight ounces
of beautiful buttery goodness. I've cut it up into small cubes just to make it a
little more easy to handle. What we're going to do with that butter is just
coat it over with the flour and then rub it between your fingers and your thumbs
until you get what feels like a sort of loose breadcrumb. Sure you can actually
do this in a processor but trust me this way is just as simple and by doing it by
hand you get a real melt in the mouth pastry. Now some people will say to use
cold butter I never think it makes a difference, you've just got to end up
warming the butter in your fingers, so you might as well start with soft
room-temperature butter. Now I've got two and a half ounces, 75 grams this is
superfine sugar, caster sugar we call it and it's just to sweeten the pastry
slightly. I'm just going to mix that through this beautiful crumb, get an even
distribution. Next we want to take three medium eggs and we're going to keep the
whites separate, I am actually going to be using the whites but we'll just
separate out the yolks and pop them in with our crumb. Now the egg yolks are
another form of fat and another way of keeping this pastry lovely and short but
it's also going to bind this pastry together, we're now going to take a fork
and just break these yolks up and start to fold them gently into the mix. We're
also going to need a very small amount of water, ideally the
water should be chilled. I'm going to put three to four tablespoons in with my
pastry and what I'm hoping to see here is the pastry start to ball together. Now
it's still quite crummy but it's clumping nicely, so I'm going to take the
fork out of there now and I'm going to use my hands to gently squeeze this
pastry into a ball. Now you want that pastry to come away from the bowl like
that but you don't want it to be too sticky but still nice and light and
crumbly. What I want to do now is chill this for about 30 minutes before we roll
it out. Now my pastry has chilled a little bit, I'm just going to divide it
about 1/3 and 2/3, just to make it easier to work with. I'm going to dust my
counter with a little bit of flour, we don't want to overwork our pastry but
I'm just going to make it into a square, little more flour underneath, a little
bit of flour on the top and then we're just going to roll this out till it's
about a quarter of an inch. Now don't worry if the pastry cracks a little bit
you can just use your hands to push it back together and occasionally you'll
need to flour underneath and on top just to stop it from sticking. Now rolled my
pastry till it's about a quarter of an inch thick.
Now I always travel with my pastry cutters, I want a three and a half inch
cutter but the biggest one is three-inch, so I'm pretty sure that's why they make
the lid three and a half inch. So I'm going to use the lid to cut out 12 three
and a half inch, now we can stack up our pastry cases, the inside of our cases or
if you've got room you can actually just put them straight into your pastry tins.
Now I'm using a fairly deep patty pan, it's the way I like to make my mince
pies. I'm just going to take each of those, I'm just going to gently ease it
into the pan. A week or so back I made this beautiful mincemeat, this is
homemade, it is absolutely delicious, it hasn't had time to mature completely but
it's still going to taste better than anything you've ever had in the shops.
We're going to fill up the mince pie casings, you want to fill them up fairly
generously but not overfill them because it will try to bubble over the top but
that can just add to the beauty of a mince pie. Okay we're going to flour our
countertop again and this time we're rolling out our pastry just to cut the
tops, this time we are going to use the three-inch cutter, so it makes a nice
little lid for our mince pies. So I'm just going to cut
out 12 mince pie tops, now I'm just making 12 mince pies, do not waste this
extra pastry, of course you can make a mince pie pasty with it.
Now the egg white that we kept, I've just beaten it up a little bit and I've got
the lid of a mince pie here, we're just going to brush a little bit of egg white
onto it and then we can just pop the pie lid on top, give it a little push down
and then we're just going to brush some egg white on the top of all of the pies
and then we want to sprinkle the top of these pies before they go in the oven,
fairly liberally with some caster sugar and I'm just going to cut a couple of
little holes in the top of the mince pie to let out the steam and the pressure as
they cook, because of the sugar content in this pastry we're going to cook this
at the lower temperature than we would normally do. I preheated my oven to 150
degrees Celsius that's 300F and we're going to bake these for about 20
minutes, maybe a little bit under, just keep an eye on them they want to be a
nice golden brown. The house smells great come and have a look at these. Now
they're piping hot, there's a little bit of juice bubbling out just to where I
like them, I'm going to let them cool down for two or three minutes and then I'm
going to pop them onto this cooling rack and let them completely cool down. Now I
know some of you would be doubting Thomases out there and say what is Steve
on about the Cornish pasty with mincemeat, come and take a look at these
and we just let our mince pasties cool down a little bit too. Now they're still
a little bit hot, I have actually sprinkled over a little extra caster
sugar. I like this one with the juice just starting to pour out the top, I'll
cut this open so you can see inside just how beautiful that is. This smells so
good, now talk to me in the comments if you've never made mince pies before, let
me know, let me know if you're thinking of making mince pies and which one of
the two recipes I've just put up you'd prefer, whilst you do that I'm
going to tuck in and take a bite of this, smells so good.
Oh its hot, the pastry is like shortbread, it's just melting in my mouth, the spices
from the mincemeat is just delicious. Let me know what you're all up to this
Christmas, I hope you have a wonderful time and I hope you make some mince pies.
Be good and I will see you very shortly in another episode of Steve's kitchen,
take care