The glossy one: my mincemeat recipe, cooked low & slow

Bundle everything into the oven on a gentle heat and leave the flavours to meld and glossify. The mincemeat keeps for months, given a chance (unlikely). Another goodie coming tomorrow…

First batch of 2025, pre icing sugar dusting: made for our village’s turning-on of lights last Saturday. The pastry was so tender it was tricky to get the pies out of the tin… just the way it should be.

Three words to entice you: warm, glossy and boozy.

I shared my mincemeat recipe last year, not long after I launched this Joyous Things newsletter. Since then, so many of you have joined this little corner of the internet that I thought it would be useful to create a new post for anyone who missed the recipe. I’ve done the same for my mum’s fluffy orange brandy butter recipe, coming for paid subscribers tomorrow, which goes sublimely with mince pies. And Christmas pudding. If you prefer to print and cook from a paper version rather than a screen, I’ve created PDFs for both recipes, too.

This is the mincemeat I make every year without fail – even if it’s at midnight on Christmas Eve. The inspiration was drawn from a wonderful recipe created a few years ago for delicious. magazine by food writer Debbie Major. I’ve given the ingredients a nudge and a tweak over the years, so this is the KB version. What sets the recipe apart is the low and slow cooking in the oven, which blends the flavours to smooth, glossy perfection. The boozy, spicy notes are noticeably deeper than when the familiar ingredients are mixed cold in a room-temperature bowl, left to steep, then piled into bottles or jars. Most of all I love the recipe’s citrussy tang: a counterbalance to the richness of the fruit, sugar and butter.

ONE QUOTE FROM A SUBSCRIBER LAST YEAR…

‘This is a game-changer – I couldn’t stop spooning it from the jar! I’ll never make another recipe.’

By the way, if you’re giving homemade mincemeat as a gift, Le Parfait or Kilner are the way to go for pretty bottling. I’m partial to the newish Kilner faceted clip jars.

Three baked & tested recipe recommendations

• This mincemeat cake by food writer Debbie Major is excellent: save a copy before the delicious. website disappears. You can use the recipe below to make it – or use good quality shop-bought mincemeat.

• Ditto this recipe by food editor Jen Bedloe, also using a little mincemeat, with the genius addition of custard powder. Light and orangey rather than trad and dark, it’s fantastic, especially served slightly warm with custard. I usually add the finely grated rind of an orange to the cake batter as well as having orange in the drizzle. And you don’t need a bundt tin to bake it: a 23cm round springform tin will be fine, but the bake time is likely to differ so check the cake after 40 minutes, then every 10 minutes or so thereafter. And line the tin with non-stick parchment.

• For the best traditional (only better) cake recipe, this one by food editor and writer Rebecca Woollard is the business. I’ve made it so many times at home and it never fails. Again, it would be wise to save a copy before the delicious. website disappears.

Coming tomorrow for paid subscribers

How to make fluffy orange brandy butter courtesy of my mum’s handed-down recipe book. Eat it with mince pies, eat it with Christmas pudding, spoon it from the bowl (I’m not judging)… I’ll include a downloadable PDF of that recipe, too, for ease.

Now let’s get to that mincemeat recipe…

Photo by Gareth Morgans/delicious. magazine, Nov 2018

KB’s low-&-slow brandy mincemeat

Once made, never forgotten.