Yesterday evening I decided to turn on my Neff oven and have a go at making mince pies from scratch for the very first time. As a first attempt I decided to cheat a little bit and buy some shop bought mince meat, although there are some fantastic recipes around the web for easy and tasty home made mince pie fillings (Jo Wheatley’s recipe looks particularly delicious!). For my mince pies I decided to use BBC Good Food’s Unbelievably Easy Mince Pies recipe. The unbelievably easy part being the deal maker.
I found the dough to be a little bit too crumbly for my patience (a bit more time kneading would have sorted it out!) so I added a little bit of water to help it bind together before forming it into balls. I also adjusted the temperature to 180ºC to compensate for the extra power of my Neff’s Circotherm technology. I find it’s a good rule of thumb to reduce conventional oven temperature guidance by around 20ºC to achieve the same results. As you can tell by my photo I decided to top my mince pies with star lids rather than the round ones suggested, which I think makes them look even more Christmassy! They also tuned out to be pretty humongous since I only had a muffin tin to use, so the predicted 18 pies turned into 6! I’m sure Santa Claus wouldn’t be complaining though if he was left one of these on Christmas Eve.