Mince pies have been filling up the supermarket shelves for the last few months and jars of ready-made mincemeat have sneakily taken their place amongst the baking ingredients ready to jump out and berate you for being completely unprepared for Christmas months in advance. If you’re one of those wonderfully organised souls you’ll have made your own batch of mincemeat several weeks ago. I, on the other hand, found myself baking with the tail-end of last year’s jars until my lovely mum kindly handed me a jar she’d made the other weekend.
Mince pies are rich and delicious which is why they’re always small. I don’t think they ever scale up to dessert-size pastries, you need the right ratio of pastry to filling. But sometimes it’s nice to make one big pie rather than spend hours cutting pastry circles and loosing teaspoons in huge jars. So in order to tackle the scale issue and ‘supersize’ mince pies the filling needs to be lightened up a little. In this simple galette the mincemeat is mixed with apples to make a festive apple filling that doesn’t weigh you down. By the time you’ve peeled and cored the apples the ratio is about 50:50 meaning you get all the flavour of both apple and Christmas spices surrounded by flaky, butter pastry. The perfect dessert for a festive family get together!
Apple and mincemeat galette
Pastry recipe from Smitten Kitchen
For the pastry:
- 125g plain flour
- ½ teaspoon sugar
- a pinch of salt
- 85g unsalted butter
- 50 ml cold water
For the filling:
- 450g apples, peeled, cored and cut into 1 cm dice
- 350g mincemeat
- 2 tbsp milk
- 1 tbsp flaked almonds
Start by making the pastry dough. In a food processor mix the flour, sugar, salt and half the butter until it resembles crumbs. Add the rest of the butter and pulse until the butter is in pea-sized bits.
Add the water a little at a time until the dough starts to come together into a ball (you may not need all the water).
Gather the dough together and pat into a disk, wrap in clingfilm and chill for 30 minutes.
Preheat the oven to 180°C.
Mix the diced apples with the mincemeat.
Roll out the pastry to a rough circle 35cm in diameter and place on a baking sheet lined with baking paper. Pile the filling into the centre of the pastry and fold up the edges.
Brush the pastry with milk and scatter the almonds over the exposed filling.
Bake for 35 minutes covering if the top looks too brown.
Leave to stand for 10 minutes before serving or cool completely and serve cold.
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