Tags
baking, butter, christmas, cooking, cranberry, dessert, holiday, mince pies, mincemeat, nigella lawson, pastry, seasonal, spices, sugar, vanilla, vegetarian
(For links to the mince pie and mincemeat recipes, scroll right to the end of the post.)
Firstly, thank you so much for your likes and follows! I certainly wasn’t expecting any attention at all for my first few posts because I know blogging takes time to get any sort of audience.
Sproutspace sucked me in and chewed me around for a while. Mr Pear was taking part in a comedy revue and I was roped in to help out with the lights. Between each of the sketches I pushed a button to turn the lights on, then pushed it again to turn them off. Well, it was a little more complicated than that, but I shan’t bore you with the details. It was performed in a fancy Elizabethan dining hall with a beautifully elaborate hammerbeam ceiling and long wooden tables and benches. It’s the kind of place where you should be drinking port and snorting about horseriding, so I felt the slightest rebellious thrill at gorging myself on Krispy Kreme doughnuts at rehearsals.
Anyway, let’s talk about Nigella Lawson’s mince pies. I haven’t actually watched much Nigella on TV. I’ve only seen a bit of one episode when she had her arm up a turkey. I can’t much relate to the untoward comments about her appearance ane the many parodies of her practically clambering into bed with various bits of food as I’ve only really engaged with her written work – I personally generally only drool over and comment on the actual food.
Sometimes, though, I do puzzle a little over the gap between how she presents herself in her book – self-effacing, sometimes even self-deprecating, primarily presenting herself as a busy home cook and mother - and the fact of her as a keen businesswoman who works bloody hard at what she does with the support of helpers and assistants. I don’t see why they might be understood as binary opposites.
But that’s by the bye.
Finally getting onto the mince pies: they are lovely. I hope I won’t be ejected from the country for this, but I must admit to not really being a fan of the shop-bought mince pies I’ve tried so far: the pastry is inoffensive and the mincemeat is a strange yellow-brown oodge which is somehow sickly-sweet and thinly sour at the same time. It is odd.
But these mince pies are quite nice: fairly light pastry, and the cranberry mincemeat is slightly set like a very thick jam so there’s no funny oozing business. I wasn’t really sure what to expect from the cranberry mincemeat at first, to be honest, because the photos just told you it looked red and lumpy as opposed to the usual brown and lumpy mincemeat. It’s quite an intense mincemeat. The fruit – fresh and dried cranberries with currants and raisins – is rounded out by the spices, and the tanginess and sweetness is well balanced. I don’t know how it measures up to good non-cranberried and alcohol-drenched mincemeat, but I rather like it as it is.
I don’t have anything significantly new to add to the recipes in terms of alterations and new ways of expressing how to make it, so I’d feel dishonest reproducing her two recipes basically in their entirety. I shall instead link you to the relevant sites…
- Recipes:
- Nigella Lawson’s star-topped mince pies (Nigella’s website)
- Nigella Lawson’s cranberry-studded mincemeat (BBC website)
- … And then add my brief notes on making them:
- Pastry: I used all butter to make the pastry and it was fine. What vegetable shortening does is add lightness and a certain moreish flavour, but it will still be a nice and light pastry. I froze the butter and flour and then used a pastry cutter to combined them and it turned out fine. And I used the juice of 4 clementines plus a little water rather than 1 orange – you should get about ~120 ml (half a cup) from a singe large orange.
- Mincemeat: You should really up the sugar if you’re making the non-alcoholic version – taste it throughout to check. I used cranberry juice with 100g brown sugar and then 6 or more tablespoons of honey to sweeten it at the end, and it still could’ve used a little more. It’s a fairly dry mincemeat and the pectin in the cranberries really encourages the mixture to set so adding a lot of honey didn’t make it too loose and gloopy. Next time I would also consider using a sweeter juice, like apple or grape, maybe also sprinkling over some sugar over the pastry just before baking, or adding a hot water and sugar glaze just afterwards, just to add an extra hint of sweetness.
