It’s not Christmas until you’ve had a mince pie! Today I’m sharing my budget homemade mince pies which are totally amazing if I do say so myself! They might not look like works of art but they’re easy to make, don’t cost a fortune and taste delicious!
I’ve shared the recipe for my homemade mince pies below with the instructions on how to make my easy peasy sweet pastry recipe (see here where I used it to make jam tarts) but I am going to hold my hands up here and admit that I cheated today and used some ready rolled sweet pastry that I picked up in the Tesco reduced section a couple of weeks ago for 39p.
This actually works out cheaper than my homemade sweet pastry when you work it out and if you want to cut corners and save some time then ready-made pastry is always a good option. In fact, instead of calling it cheating to use the ready-made version, I’m going to call it being time-efficient. 😂
How cheap can you make homemade mince pies for?
Based on the fact I used a jar and a half of ready-made mincemeat (£1 a jar) and 1 roll of ready rolled pastry (full price of 89p usually), my 18 ‘homemade’ mince pies cost me £1.89 to make which works out at 10p per mince pie. And even if you were to buy the pastry full price at £1.30 then it would cost you around 15p per mince pie.
Based on the current prices at Tesco, which I chose because that’s where I bought the reduced pastry from, the cost of homemade pastry would be around £1.06 although you’d probably have most things in so wouldn’t really need to buy them. That’s based on flour (18p), butter (66p), sugar (6p) and egg yolk (16p) and would make each mince pie come out at around 14p.
Homemade Mince Pies
It's not Christmas until you've had your first mince pie and this homemade mince pie recipe is not only easy and delicious but it's also super cheap and makes cute little mince pies that everyone will love!
Ingredients
- 250g plain flour
- 125g butter, chilled and chopped
- 75g sugar
- 1 egg yolk
- 1 tablespoon chilled water
- A jar of mincemeat (or just however much you have leftover)
Instructions
- Preheat your oven to 180 c
- Combine the flour, butter and sugar together in a food processor until the mix resembles fine breadcrumbs. You can rub the butter into the flour and sugar mix if you want to go old school.
- Add the egg yolk and the chilled water.
- Mix again for a short time until the dough just starts to come together. Don't over mix at the stage.
- Turn your pastry out onto a lightly floured surface and knead it until it’s smooth.
- Flatten your ball of pastry slightly and wrap it up in some baking paper.
- Pop it in the fridge for half an hour.
- After half an hour, take it out and in a lightly floured surface, roll it to about half a centimetre thick.
- Cut rounds out of the pastry using a cookie cutter, the top of a glass or whatever else you want to use and pop them into a very lightly greased baking tray.
- Pop a spoonful of jam into each pastry round and decorate with the leftover bits of pastry. For some of the pies, I used a pizza cutter to easily slice the leftover pastry into thin strips and I just lay them over the top of the pie trying to squidge it down at the edges to stick it in. The others I just used a small Christmas cookie cutter to cut out a Christmassy shape to put on the top of the pies.
- Bake them in the oven for 10-12 minutes or until I see the pastry start to go a light golden colour.
- Dust lightly with icing sugar just before serving!
Notes
You can use this recipe for jam tarts too - or even a mix if you only have a little mincemeat leftover and have pastry to use up!
Also, as you can see from the pictures, I overfilled quite a few of mine but all was good as the icing sugar you dust over them just before serving covers up most imperfections.
Enjoy with a cup of tea or a glass of sherry, just like my nana used to!
For a less festive alternative, you could use some of my windfall applesauce in place of the mincemeat which would taste amazing.
Don’t miss out on future posts like this – receive updates directly to your inbox by email by adding your email address here and hitting subscribe. You can also follow me on Twitter or BlogLovin and I’d love to see you over on my Facebook page and on Instagram. If you’re interested, you can find out more about me here and while I’ve got your attention, if you’re wondering why some of my posts lately are a little bit less frugal then have a read of this post. 😉
Do your future self a favour – Pin my homemade mince pies for later:
