Easy Christmas Recipe: Mincemeat Filo Rolls

I do love mince pies, but sadly the pastry doesn’t love me. This Christmas I thought I’d try making a batch of alternative mince pies, but with filo pastry and in the style of a spring roll. These Mincemeat Filo Rolls were really, really lovely. The great news is they didn’t take very much time at all and I managed to roll up the lot whilst sat at my kitchen table watching The Motherland Christmas Special, which was only 30 minutes long.

This recipe makes 24 mincemeat filo rolls and they would keep well for a few days in an airtight container. You can eat them cold or warm them in the oven if you prefer. They’re lovely dipped in brandy cream or just as they are.

Mincemeat Filo Rolls

Ingredients:
1 packet of filo pastry
2 jars of mincemeat
100g melted butter
Icing sugar (optional)

Easy Christmas Recipe: Mincemeat Filo Rolls

How to make your Mincemeat Filo Rolls:
You’ll need to work pretty quickly as once the filo pastry is out of the packet it starts to dry up.

Line two large baking trays with baking parchment and pre-heat your oven to 180°.

Unroll your filo pastry and cut into quarters. Open your jars of mincemeat and get your melted butter ready. Below is a pictorial guide on how I put them together. I took one quarter of a sheet, brushed it with melted butter and put another sheet of filo pastry on top. I then put a heaped teaspoon of mincemeat on the pastry and brushed the edges with melted butter.

Easy Christmas Recipe: Mincemeat Filo Rolls

As you can see, I folded the filo in on the long sides and dabbed some more melted butter along the edges to seal everything in, then rolled them up tight. I put each one with the edge side down on a baking sheet, and once I’d finished I brushed them with more melted butter and put them in the oven.

Bake in the oven for around 30 minutes. Check on them at about 20 minutes and remove from the oven when they’re golden and crisp looking. Leave them to cool because hot mincemeat is essentially fruity lava, once they’re cooler you can dust with icing sugar if you like and serve them with boozy cream or brandy butter.

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Easy Christmas Recipe: Mincemeat Filo Rolls

Easy Christmas Recipe: Mincemeat Flapjack

One of the most enduring and classic flavours of Christmas is mincemeat. Mince pies are an undeniable Christmas classic, but I’ve been throwing mincemeat into cakes and vol au vents for a few years now. It’s too good an ingredient just to use in little pies. This week I baked a hearty batch of mincemeat flapjack and they all but disappeared in an afternoon. They’re simple, they’re filling and most of all, they’re delicious.

Easy Christmas Recipe: Mincemeat Flapjack

I confess, this idea is not my own. We went for a family walk at Tatton Park in Cheshire, whilst warming up with a cup of tea, we all had a piece of cake. I chose the mincemeat flapjack and was inspired enough to try to recreate it when I got home. If anything I think my version is slightly better, with more mincemeat and a less soggy, slightly firmer texture.

You could try adapting your own favourite flapjack recipe by adding some mincemeat, or you could try my recipe below. It’s delicious, a real crowd-pleaser and would be a lovely addition to a lunch box in the run up to Christmas! This recipe makes about 12 squares of flapjack.

Mincemeat Flapjack

Ingredients:

175g of light brown sugar
150g butter or margarine
3 tablespoons of golden syrup
1 teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda
200g of porridge oats
200g plain flour
150g mincemeat

How to make your mincemeat flapjack:

Pre-heat your oven to 180° and line a high sided baking tin with baking parchment. I use a roasting tin, because that’s all I have.

In a pan melt your butter, sugar, golden syrup and bicarbonate of soda. Make sure you stir occasionally until it’s all melted together. Once it’s all melted, add your mincemeat and stir through.

Put your flour and oats in a large bowl and pour over the contents of the pan, mix and mix until everything is well combined. Pour into your lined baking dish and put it in the oven for 20-30 minutes until it’s firm and golden.

Easy Christmas Recipe: Mincemeat Flapjack

Remove from the oven and leave to cool for as long as you can stand it. Slice the flapjack into squares and enjoy with a nice cup of tea.

If you enjoyed this recipe, you might also like to try –

Easy Christmas Recipe: Mincemeat Flapjack

Easy Christmas Recipe: Mincemeat Vol au Vents

It’s not often I have a guest post to share with you, but when Bobble Bardsley tweeted a picture of his Mincemeat Vol au Vents I knew it was a stroke of genius that needed to be shared. I dislike pastry so I struggle with mince pies, but the idea of a Mincemeat Vol au Vent is fantastic. They have all the traditional mince pie taste but with considerably less of the claggy pastry. I am definitely going to try these out! Over to you Bob….

These delicious morsels were an accident – we ran out of fillings for our vol au vents one Christmas (in the 2010s, not the 1980s!) so the mincemeat came out of the cupboard and we filled the last few pastry cases with that.

It was a revelation. If you find homemade mince pies a bit too chewy, or your pastry always goes ‘caramelised’ (AKA burnt) these are a great alternative, and can be made from scratch within about 15 minutes.

Mincemeat Vol au Vents

If you find homemade mince pies a bit too chewy, or your pastry always gets burnt these are a great alternative, and can be made from scratch within about 15 minutes.

Ingredients
Frozen vol au vent cases
Milk/egg wash
Mincemeat
Icing sugar (for decoration)

Instructions
Remove the vol au vent cases from their packaging, wash with milk or egg so they go golden brown when baked, and arrange on a baking tray with a small gap between them.

Bake according to the packaging instructions – I used Jus-Rol vol au vents, and the instructions were 220C for about 13-15 minutes.

With a few minutes spare, remove the vol au vents from the oven. They should already be golden, and very nearly cooked.

Push down their ‘hats’ to create a hollow, and add a teaspoon of mincemeat to each one. A dozen vol au vents will take anywhere around 150-200g depending on how much you fill them.

Return to the hot oven for a few minutes until the suet has melted and the mincemeat has ‘relaxed’ into the bottom of its pastry nest.

Remove and allow to cool. At this stage I used a flour sifter to dust them with icing sugar. If you don’t have a sweet tooth, the mincemeat and pastry alone are delicious together.

Notes –

I prefer to glaze with milk rather than egg. Be generous, so your pastry is quite ‘wet’ when it goes into the oven.
Have a palette knife or sharp-edged silicone spatula ready to prise the pastry cases off of the baking tray once they’re done. Alternatively use non-stick baking parchment if you have any.
Be quite frugal with the mincemeat. They might not look very full, but you’ll be glad of that when you take a bite, and the flaky vol au vent pastry starts to collapse. It’s much easier to just shove the whole thing in at once and then reach for another.

Don’t let ANYONE tell you vol au vents are old-fashioned. They’ll soon change their tune once they taste one of these. Mincemeat vol au vents are the future!

Mincemeat Vol au Vents

If you enjoyed this recipe, you might also like to try these mincemeat flapjacks.

Review: A Personalised Christmas Plate for Santa

We were sent this personalised Christmas Plate for the purposes of this post. All images and opinions are our own.

Christmas is full of traditions. Christingle services, Carols, decorating the Christmas tree, visits to see Father Christmas to tell him what you’d like (train sets and more train sets please); and leaving mince pies, a small glass of sherry and a carrot for Rudolph by the fireplace on Christmas Eve. These are enduring and lovely traditions and things we wholeheartedly embrace.

Last Christmas the small boy was very excited to discover the empty plate and the half eaten carrot on Christmas morning, so when we were given a lovely personalised Christmas plate by Bluebelle Create for that very purpose, he couldn’t wait to fill it with homemade mince pies.

The cute Rudolph Christmas plate arrived quickly and was really well packaged. The box is labelled with his name on it and the plate was safely wrapped in layers of bubble wrap and tissue paper. We carefully saved this so we can wrap it back up every year after Christmas.

Christmas plate

The Christmas plate is hand painted by Bluebelle Create and can be personalised however you’d like. We chose to have just his name on it, but you can have whatever you want as long as it isn’t too long. The plate says “A gift for Father Christmas & Rudolph… Love from Benjamin xxx” and is 24cm in diameter. There are a few options for what text you’d like on your plate. They’ll even put a personalised message on the back, which is a lovely idea if you’re giving it as a gift.

The plate is hand painted and probably best not put in the dishwasher or microwave; but it’s not too delicate either and will happily be hand washed the old fashioned way. It’s cute, brightly coloured and very festive looking. It would make a lovely keepsake for your child or a pre-Christmas gift for someone.

There are lots of designs to choose from and personalisation options. I cannot fault this lovely festive plate, nor the service or delivery. The price is very reasonable too, starting from £14.99 for a smaller plate; though we chose the larger £18.99 option. I think it’s good value for a hand painted personalised plate, and one which will be used for many, many years to come.

It’s beautifully hand drawn and painted, it’s a real keepsake gift, one which we’ll use year after year and beyond. This is one tradition I firmly approve of, I’m sure Father Christmas and Rudolph will also agree.