Pimped Up Mince Pies

These fruit mince pies are light but complex in flavour and more appealing than a straight fruit mince pie. Instead of a pastry lid serve them with a dollop of whiskey laced cream sprinkled with cinnamon and try and stop at one!

The pies can be stored in an airtight container for a week or so without the cream topping, and the whiskey cream can also be stored in the fridge for a week.

Any leftover fruit mince is yummy stirred through ice-cream or yoghurt.

Pastry

The pastry method takes a lot of pain out of trying to roll out rock hard pastry by reversing the order of chilling it.

2 cups plain flour

1tbs icing sugar

175g butter, chilled and cubed

1 egg yolk

Put everything into a food processor and blitz until it just forms a ball.

Divide  the ball into 2 and roll both out between two sheets of glad wrap or baking paper to about 2mm thick.

Place the pastry sheets in the fridge and chill for 30 minutes.

Pimped up Fruit Mince

400g jar of good quality fruit mince (I used Robertsons)

1 apple, grated

4 dried figs, diced

6 nuggets of place ginger, finely chopped

1/2 cup dark chocolate buds

Stir everything together

Preheat the oven to 160c

Stamp out the chilled pastry into 6cm rounds and line pastry tins.

Spoon a heaped teaspoon of fruit mince into each pastry shell.

Bake for 20 minutes.

Let them sit in the tins for 5 minutes, because they will be too fragile to shift.

Cool on a wire rack.

Serve with a dollop of whiskey cream or a dredging of icing sugar.

Makes 36 pies.

Whiskey cream

1 cup whipped cream

1 tsp icing sugar

1tbs whiskey

stir the icing sugar into the whiskey until it has completely dissolved and fold the liquid through the whipped cream.