It’s bakemas 2020!
If it’s your first bakemas here, welcome. It is my annual mini-series in which I show you how to make a various Christmas themed baked goods – perfect if you want to impress your family and/or friends or if you’re hosting a festive get together.
The recipe I’m about to share with you, may change your festive favourite forever (seriously, I’m not kidding). How do you feel about chocolate orange mince pies? A little different but honestly, it’s a good different.
I’ve taken the classic mince pie and twisted it to make it better. Don’t get me wrong, theres nothing wrong with a mince pie but they can get a little boring, so why not add a little more flavour?
The main difference is in the pastry. Instead of plain pastry, I’ve made it a chocolate orange. The filling is almost identical, the mincemeat hasn’t changed but under the mincemeat filling I have added a button of 100% very dark chocolate – it helps balance the sweetness of the mincemeat filling and compliments the orange in the pastry perfectly.
To make this recipe even better, you’ll want to use good quality ingredients. That’s why I’ve used Cocoa Runners new baking range, including cocoa powder and unsweetened dark chocolate but they also offer milk chocolate, dark chocolate and cocoa nibs. I have also used them in my best ever brownies recipe, don’t forget to check them out if you’re interested!
Anyway, let’s get started, shall we?
Ingredients:
Pastry:
1 Egg.
90g Granulated sugar.
225g Butter, chilled.
350g Plain flour.
25g Cocoa powder.
A generous pinch of salt.
Zest of 1 orange
Filling:
Cocoa Runners 100% cocoa chocolate.
A large jar of sweet mincemeat (homemade or shop bought works well in this recipe).
Method:
Before you get started on the recipe, you’ll want to do some prep work. Start by weighing up your ingredients, grab any equipment you may need such as a food processor, muffin tin, whisk and spatula. You will also need clingfilm (to wrap the dough in) and for when the time comes, you will need to preheat the oven to 180˚c/350˚f.
To start on the mince pies, you’ll need to make the pastry. Into a small/medium bowl, place the egg and sugar into a bowl and whisk them together until they are well combined. Set aside until its needed later on.
Take a food processor and place in the flour, cocoa powder and salt, then pulse them together until they are combined.
Then add in all of your butter and pulse until it’s incorporated. At this stage it won’t come together as a dough, this is normal.
Now you can go ahead and add in the egg/sugar mixture, then pulse the mixture until it starts coming together but don’t let it fully combine. If you fully combine it in the food processor, it may overwork the gluten and make the pastry tough in texture.
Flour your work surface with flour and place the dough onto it and give it all a brief knead until everything is fully incorporated, bring the dough into a smooth round and then wrap in clingfilm. Place in the fridge and chill in the fridge for around and hour (or you can make this the day before to save time).
Once the dough has chilled for a least an hour in the fridge, you can work with it. Flour your work surface and place the dough on top of the flour, then roll it out until the pastry is around 5mm.
Using a 3 1/2 inch round cookie cutter, cut out 12 circles. Gently push these into your muffin tin, to create the main body of the pastry case. Don’t worry if they’re not perfect, you can fix this with the lid plus these don’t need to look perfect, nobody will bat an eyelid at them, especially once they try them!
You can then go ahead a generously fill the unbaked pastry cases with mincemeat. When it comes to the mincemeat, feel free to make your own or use shop bought, which ever you have to hand.
Take the excess pastry and roll it out, this will be the second roll – I don’t recommend rolling it out more than twice as it can make the pastry quite tough and not very nice to eat.
Roll the pastry out to 5mm in thickness and use a 2 1/2 inch round cookie cutter to cut the lids for the mince pies. Make sure you cut out the exact same amount you have for the pastry cases – for me this was 12. There should be a little bit of roll out pastry left, feel free to use a small festive themed cutter and make some decorations for the tops of the mince pies.
To assemble the mince pies ready to be baked off, place the lids on top of the mince pies and secure the lid to the pastry case by pressing down a fork into two. Repeat this for all of your mince pies.
Egg wash the tops of the pies, then place on the decoration, for me it was a snowflake shape. You will also want to egg wash the decoration, once you have done this, you can place the mince pies into your preheated oven and bake off for 20-25 minutes or until they turned a toasty brown colour.
When they are done baking, remove from the oven and allow to cool I the tray until you can remove them, then allow to completely fo cold on a cooling rack.
I will be honest, I have one that was still warm and its probably the best way to enjoy a mince pie, so enjoy slightly warm if you can.
As an optional finish, once they are cooled down, you can dust them lightly with some icing sugar.
That’s all for today guys, I hope you enjoyed. If you did, don’t forget to share this recipe with your family and friends and enjoy it. I’ll be back soon with another blog post and YouTube video, so join me then. In the meanwhile, don’t forget to check out my other social’s – Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube. The YouTube tutorial will be linked down below.
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