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christmas mince pies

I know—I’ve had rather a high proportion of sweets-related posts in the last few months. But I can’t let Christmas go by without writing something about mince pies, which are for my family the equivalent of chestnuts roasting on an open fire (or something like that).

Mince pies aren’t all that common in the US. They’re the sort of thing that as a child you imagine Christmas couldn’t exist without, until you encounter enough raised eyebrows at their mention to set you straight. You could think of them as a dessert, but their ideal counterpart is tea—steaming PG Tips served in china teacups with gold rims. In my family the mince pie-making starts early in December, and it’s all about the assembly: cutting the bottoms and tops with a tall beer glass, buttering my grandmother’s special indented pans, slicing little crosses on the tops for the steam to escape. To this end we’ve always kept it simple with store-bought pastry and store-bought mincemeat, though the jar is liberally doctored with rum as soon as it’s opened, of course.

When December arrived several weeks ago, though, I had no pastry in the freezer, no bottle of mincemeat mysteriously still fresh after a year in the back of the fridge. I’d never considered making the filling—a rich, jammy mix of fruit of spices—myself, but desperation drove me to eye the raisins and apples in our pantry and the ancient bottle of vermouth perched above the cottage stove. The following recipe comes after several tries, but I can safely say I’m a homemade mincemeat convert. Playing with it—trying different fruits, nuts, and liquors—has been lots of fun, and there’s little else I can imagine that will make your kitchen smell quite so delicious.

Christmas Mince Pies

Below is my own recipe for the mincemeat filling, and I also made the pastry from scratch using this recipe from the blog I turn to for all things baking, Smitten Kitchen.

1 Tbsp butter

2 apples, peeled and chopped into small cubes

cinnamon

cloves

1/4 cup brown sugar

zest and juice of 1 orange

generous splash rum (or sweet vermouth)

1 cup dried fruit, chopped (I used raisins, prunes, dates, and dried cherries)

1 recipe for pie pastry

To make the filling, melt the butter over medium heat in a small saucepan and add in the chopped apples. Sprinkle with liberal pinches of cinnamon and cloves, then add the brown sugar and stir until the apple pieces are coated with butter, sugar and spice. Add the orange zest, juice, and rum to taste, then add in your assorted dried fruit. Pour a bit of boiling water until the fruit is just covered, then turn the heat to low and simmer, covered, until everything is soft, thick and gooey.

Meanwhile either make or defrost your pastry and roll it out until it’s fairly thin. Use a glass to cut your circles, and place the bottoms in a muffin pan. Scoop a small spoonful of the mincemeat into each bottom and run a finger dipped in water around the circumference of the pastry–this will help the top adhere to the bottom. Press the tops on using your fingertips to pinch the edges together, then finish by cutting small crosses on your pies and brushing them with egg. Bake at 350 degrees for 15-20 minutes, or until the pies are golden brown.

chocolate mila cake

I remember loving two things as a 13-year-old: my lilac stretchy halter dress and Mila cake.

The dress I thought “showed off my curves” (the non-existent ones), and I wore it to every dance at my school that year, not to mention trips to the grocery store, youth symphony rehearsals, and birthday parties. It was at one such birthday that I first encountered Mila cake, a hybrid brownie-cake creation of a friend’s Swedish mother that was crumby on the outside and irresistibly gooey in the middle. I was going through a bit of a “health phase” at the time, baking tasteless brick-like lemon loaves that oozed olive oil and dreaming of opening a soy-products store called “Edamame.” The Mila cake was the first glimmer of my return to butter, sugar and cocoa, a herald of the joyfulness eating could be.

I tasted it a handful of times after that, and then it was gone—disappeared into the vault of childhood memory along with Zoo biscuits, Nicole’s mom’s shepherd’s pie, and the curious sweetness of the chocolates that came in my Christmas Advent calendar. For years I imagined what it would be like to make it, and no brownie or chocolate cake quite lived up to that legendary first bite. A photo of me in my dress eating Mila cake became a sort of talisman, a perfect moment when all my younger, simpler desires were fulfilled. It only occurred to me this week, almost ten years later, that the cake might be a Swedish specialty, and a quick google search revealed my hunch to be on the right track—the photos of “kladdkaka,” a traditional Swedish chocolate cake, looked almost exactly like the cake that had eluded me for so long.

We all know no memory can ever be truly fulfilled—no tube of Nestlé Smarties tastes quite like the one you were given by your grandparents when they came to visit, and that crush you had in fourth grade definitely looked cuter with braces. But having made what I still consider “Mila cake” three times now, I feel I’m getting close (partly because no cake lasted more than three hours on the kitchen table). And along with the old memories, I now have a collection of new ones: my last winter nights in the cottage, with Christine playing music, Phillip and Ross playing zombies, Sara eating a bagel on the couch, Adam in his red sweater and hat, and an empty pan of Mila cake crumbs on the living room table.

Chocolate Mila Cake

Adapted from the recipe for Swedish Kladdkaka on It’s Time to Bake.

2 eggs

2/3 cup sugar

1/2 cup flour

3 Tbsp cocoa powder

pinch salt

2 Tbsp vanilla extract

1/2 cup melted butter

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Beat the eggs with the sugar until mixed, then add in the flour, cocoa powder and salt one at a time. Whisk the vanilla extract with the melted butter, then combine with the egg mixture and pour batter into a greased 8-inch pie plate. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes, or until the edges are set and the middle is still soft and gooey.